The short version: I build synthetic cells, chemical systems assembled from non-living parts that behave in increasingly lifelike ways. The longer version is more fun.

I caught the bug as a third-year undergrad at UNSW, when I was introduced to chemical self-assembly: the idea that large, ordered structures can be built by carefully designing how individual molecules interact. I took it into an Honours project in Prof. Pall Thordarson's lab, applying those principles to the then-new field of bottom-up synthetic cells. The result was a synthetic proto-chloroplast that could take blue light and turn it into a proton gradient.

I couldn't stop there. Palli and I set ourselves the wildly ambitious PhD goal of building the first artificial mitochondria: multi-layered, polymer-based, and packed with electron-transporting membrane proteins. I never did make a working one (it was a very complex beast), but along the way I learned to synthesise my own block copolymers that self-assemble into asymmetric membranes, to coax enormous membrane proteins into working inside synthetic membranes, and above all, to design large multicomponent systems that build themselves.

Finishing in 2017, the standard advice was to go and do a postdoc somewhere new. I did the opposite, and joined Jan van Hest's lab in the Netherlands, one of the original inventors of the polymer vesicle I'd spent my PhD studying. My PhD had felt academically isolated, and I wanted somewhere I could grab a coffee with a colleague and dream up crazy new ideas for synthetic cells. That's exactly what I found. Alongside my own projects I mentored three brilliant PhD students, and working with Dave Williams I learned to make complex coacervates: dense, gooey blobs that are a fantastic mimic of the cell's cytosol.

In 2021, with a 10-month-old in tow, we left Europe at the height of COVID and came home to Australia. I landed in A/Prof Matthew Baker's lab at UNSW, tasked with building a synthetic retina from water-in-oil droplet networks (you can do incredible things with droplets!). Matt taught me to build my own TIRF microscope and to be resourceful, which led to DIB-BOT: a DIY liquid-handling robot built on a 3D printer that makes droplet networks far better than I ever could by hand.

These two very different postdocs set up my DECRA, and in 2023 I moved to the University of Wollongong to begin it. Through the Synthetic Biomimetic Compartments group, we're building an experimental platform to rigorously probe how molecular-scale fluctuations give rise to higher-order behaviour, a link that sits right at the heart of how we understand life. That's the fundamental half of the lab. The other half points the same synthetic-cell toolkit at real-world problems. Active Guidance Beads, for instance, deliver chemical signals with spatial control to grow distinct motor neurone subtypes from a single culture, a step towards far more accurate models of motor neurone disease, recently backed by MND Australia. These are the first projects of many. What I love most about running my own group is who I do it with: mentoring and working with brilliant researchers, asking difficult questions together, and finding inventive ways to answer them.