For Dr Bishwa Subedi, the opportunity to work in the field of FBDD and contribute directly towards therapeutic medicine was the motivation to join the Centre for Fragment-Based Design as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

“It is a great opportunity to excel my academic career – to get exposure to industry partners, share my knowledge, work on different research projects and get insight into different lab work approaches,” he says.

Research Overview

Bishwa’s area of expertise is in protein biochemistry and aspects such as protein expression, purification and crystallisation, protein structure determination, protein structure-function relationship and protein-ligand/small molecule interaction.

Currently, Bishwa is looking at the structural aspect of FBDD for fatty acid-binding proteins (FABPs). Within the Centre, he works with various aspects in structure determination method of drug targets using X-ray crystallography technique. His current research aims to contribute towards designing compounds that could act as drug candidate for FABPs.

Latest Publications

View Dr Subedi’s latest ORCID publication listing here.

Education

Bishwa completed his Master’s degree in Bioinformatics at the University of Turku, Finland, which included a research project related to macromolecular crystallography. Continuing this work as a Research Assistant at the protein crystallography core facility in the Turku Centre for Biotechnology (now known as Turku Bioscience), he also attended the University of Zaragoza as a visiting researcher where he learned to work with molecular and biochemical techniques and collaborated in the protein crystallography aspect of the project.

Following this, Bishwa went on to pursue his PhD in Biochemistry at Massey University, New Zealand. His PhD involved a collaborative project with AgResearch Institute and Massey University. Supervised by Associate Professor Andrew Sutherland-Smith (Massey) and Ron Ronimus (AgResearch), Bishwa worked with the structure determination of cell wall synthesizing enzymes.

“I have always been interested in implementing my knowledge and experience to contribute towards medicine and human health. My PhD was an opportunity to learn as well as contribute towards a specific project, to be competitive in the field – and I choose to work in a project which was more challenging and allowed me to learn more techniques,” he says.

Grants and Awards

• EURECA scholarship (to fund Master’s degree in Bioinformatics)
• Varsinais-Suomi regional research fund (to extend Master’s research project)
• Erasmus mundus exchange program scholarship (to attend University of Zaragoza)
• Royal Society of New Zealand, Marsden Fund (to fund PhD project)