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Some seminars were recorded and accessible for a limited time on our youtube channel.

Upcoming Speakers

May 28th, 2026

Host: Katherine Donovan / Sean Gao

Bekky Feltham

WEHI

E3 Ligases, From Cellular Regulators to Drug Targets.

Rebecca (Bekky) Feltham is a Laboratory Head at Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and co-founder of Ternarx. She has over 20 years’ experience in ubiquitin signalling, E3 ligase biology, and more recently targeted protein degradation (TPD).

Her research focuses on understanding and exploiting the ubiquitin system to enable new therapeutic strategies. She led the development of the E3 Ligase Compendium (the E3-ome), a globally collaborative effort involving more than 40 leading laboratories, creating the first comprehensive, expert-curated map of the human E3 ligase landscape to drive degrader discovery. She also co-developed NanoTACs in partnership with PROMEGA and established tag-targeting degrader platforms for target validation at WEHI, now used by more than 30 research groups nationally.

Ternarx is a biotechnology company developing degrader therapies for cancer and inflammatory disease. At Ternarx, she leads two core platforms, tag-targeting degrader modelling for rapid preclinical target validation, and TissueSAFE, a discovery framework for identifying tissue-selective E3 ligases. Together, these platforms underpin the company’s pipeline and are designed to de-risk therapeutic development at the earliest stages.

Outside the lab, Rebecca is also a mum and a strong advocate for flexible working, which has informed her approach to leadership, resilience, and creating supportive environments.

Vasileios Voutsinos

University of Copenhagen

Mapping degrons in human proteins.

Vasileios Voutsinos is an Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen. He completed his PhD in DNA repair and genome stability. During his postdoctoral studies, he switched his focus to the area of proteostasis, specifically trying to map degrons in human cytosolic proteins and transcription factors.

As part of his postdoctoral training, he was a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar for one year at the University of Washington, where he learned about cutting-edge high-throughput techniques to analyze protein variants using growth and FACS-based assays.

His current research focuses on using these approaches to study the impact of protein mutations on function and abundance, as well as further understanding of human degrons and mechanisms of targeted protein degradation.

June 11th, 2026

Host: Mikolaj Slabicki

Michael Rapé

UC Berkeley

Modulating protein complexes in development and disease.

Michael Rapé is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the founding Head of the Molecular Therapeutics Division, and the Dr. K. Peter Hirth Chair of Cancer Biology at UC Berkeley.

Michael’s work revealed ubiquitin chain types, essential ubiquitylation enzymes and substrates, and ubiquitylation mechanisms essential for development and disease. He is known for developing the “ubiquitin code” hypothesis, discovering the role of VCP as a ubiquitin-dependent segregase, identifying quality control programs such as the reductive stress response and dimerization quality control, and pinpointing stress response silencing as a crucial process preventing neurodegenerative disease. His work has been recognized with a Pew Scholar’s Award, an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, a Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise, and the National Blavatnik Award. Michael has recently been elected as foreign member of EMBO.

Michael co-founded Nurix, Zenith, Lyterian and Reina Therapeutics, and he is an iPartner at The Column Group Ventures.

June 25th, 2026

Host: Breanna Zerfas

Chetan Chana

Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute

Identification of CLEO4-88 as a molecular glue of GID4 and ACAA1

Chetan obtained her BSc at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, where she completed a thesis project in Dr. Gary Shaw’s lab and gained interest in the ubiquitin-proteasome system. Thereafter, Chetan completed her PhD at the University of Toronto in Dr. Frank Sicheri’s lab. Her graduate research focused on the structure and function of CTLH E3 ligase complexes and the development of small molecules to the CTLH substrate adapter subunit GID4. She will be sharing some of that work today. Currently, Chetan works as a research scientist in a biotech company in the Bay Area.

Monica Rodrigo

AstraZeneca

Engineering Selective Cereblon Engagement: Mechanistic Insights and Proteome‑Wide Off‑Target Assessment for Safer Targeted Protein Degraders

Monica Rodrigo joined AstraZeneca in 2019 with over 15 years of experience in the ubiquitin field. She received her PhD from University of California, San Francisco, where she studied the Anaphase Promoting Complex, a megadalton E3 ubiquitin ligase, and the role that E2 ubiquitin conjugating enzymes play in ubiquitin chain extension. She came to the UK for her postdoc at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where she studied the ubiquitin-dependent degradation of mislocalized membrane proteins. Prior to joining AZ, she was a principal laboratory research scientist at the Francis Crick Institute, working on DNA repair mechanisms. She joined the PROTAC Safety team in Clinical Pharmacology and Safety Sciences in 2019, helping to shape the safety strategy for targeted protein degraders.

July 9th, 2026