M.Sc. Christina Sutherland
Research
Having always had a fascination for the biochemistry behind disease emergence and a keen interest in the development of novel therapeutics, within the Cell and Chemical Biology department I get to combine my knowledge in synthetic chemistry and biochemistry to study the mechanisms behind the development of Huntington’s disease (HD).
More specifically, during my PhD, I will be developing chemical tools to investigate the involvement of ubiquitination and deubiquitination in the clearance, or lack thereof, of the mutant Huntingtin protein, providing an improved understanding and modulation of protein aggregation in polyglutamine (polyQ) diseases such as Huntington’s.
Curriculum Vitae
I hold a BSc degree in Chemistry from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, where I majored in Chemical Synthesis and Biochemistry. I subsequently completed a MSc in Medicinal Chemistry, at the University of Copenhagen, and Drug Discovery and Safety, at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, as part of their Double Degree collaboration. During this time I was fortunate enough to complete internships related to Virtual Ligand Screening, Fragment-Based Drug Discovery as well as Total Synthesis.
After spending a year in industry, working as a Senior Research Chemist at Symeres B.V. in Nijmegen, I have joined the Cell and Chemical Biology department for my PhD, under the supervision of Monique Mulder and as part of the CureQ consortium, where I will be studying the interplay between (de)ubiquitination and Huntington’s disease.
