Prof. Margaret Sunde The University of Sydney, Australia

Margie Sunde completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge and then held postdoctoral fellowships at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge with Colin Blake and Chris Dobson before starting her independent group at the University of Cambridge with the support of a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. Her major... read moreresearch focus is the molecular basis for amyloid fibril formation. Her postdoctoral work provided evidence that all amyloid fibrils share a common underlying beta-sheet structure and that amyloid formation associated with disease is caused by protein misfolding. After moving to Australia, Margie built a program investigating functional amyloid structures, in particular microbial amyloids with biological activity. Margie is now Professor of Molecular Biomedicine in the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Sydney. Her group has elucidated the structure of functional amyloids on the surface of fungal spores, including demonstrating that these amyloids only form amyloid at hydrophobic:hydrophilic interfaces. They have developed novel methods to study heteromeric amyloids, which are amyloids composed of two or more different proteins. These hybrid amyloids play important roles in mammalian signalling and in viral evasion of the host immune response.