Julie Connelly
Research Associate
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: MSc University of Edinburgh
Research Areas: Natural Products; Drug Discovery
Julie graduated with her Bachelor’s degree in Immunology from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland in 2008. In 2012 she began working in the Central Technical Support Lab at the University of Dundee’s College of Life Sciences. This led her to choose to study for a Masters in Drug Discovery and Protein Biotechnology. She graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2017 with this qualification.
In January 2018, Julie joined Kris Gunsalus’s research group in the CGSB department at NYUAD. Here she works on a Natural Products HCS Drug Discovery project.
Research
Julie is part of a team working on a Natural Products Drug Discovery project. Marine microbes from the Abu Dhabi region have been isolated and cultured to extract bioactive compounds. The team aims to identify novel compounds with broad-spectrum activity against parasitic worms, bacteria, and fungi. High-Throughput (HTP) screening of whole organisms (microbes, nematodes) and High-Content Phenotypic profiling (HCP) of mammalian cells are used to identify and characterize novel compounds.