Highlights

Professor David Fairlie is internationally known for his research contributions in the fields of medicinal chemistry, organic chemistry, biological chemistry and in several disciplines in biology (pharmacology, virology, immunology, neurobiology, biochemistry). He has had strong research programs in chemistry, biochemistry and pharmacology continuously funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) since 1991 and the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) since 1995. He was awarded prestigious fellowships from the ARC, in the form of an Australian Professorial Fellowship (2002-2006) and an Australian Federation Fellowship (2006-2011), and from the NHMRC, in the form of a Senior Principal Research Fellowship (2012-2016 and 2017-2021). He has held numerous research grants in chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology, virology, immunology, parasitology, neurobiology and oncology; including 15 multimillion dollar grants from industry and governments. He has served on academic and industry advisory panels, company boards, and research grant panels both in Australia and overseas. He collaborates with some of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies.

Professor Fairlie has >300 publications (h index >60; >14,000 citations; >35 cites per article; >30 articles >100 citations) and presents 5-10 invited plenary and keynote lectures around the world each year. He is also well known in the international pharmaceutical arena, having consulted to multiple big pharma on protease inhibitors, GPCR modulators, protein and peptide mimics, drug design and discovery, and pharmacology. He has been involved in four startup companies in Australia and the USA.

Publications by David Fairlie

Researcher biography

Professor Fairlie is an NHMRC Research Investigator Fellow (Level 3) (2022-present), a Node Leader of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Innovations in Peptide Protein Science, one of four Centre Directors and former Head of the Division of Chemistry of Structural Biology at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (since 2009), and an Affiliate Professor of the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences. He was previously an NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow (2012-2021), a Node Leader at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Advanced Molecular Imaging (2014-2021), an ARC Federation Fellow (2006-2011), an ARC Professorial Fellow (2002-2006), and Scientific Director and Chief Scientific Officer of a startup company. He undertook postdoctoral studies at Stanford University and University of Toronto, postgraduate studies at Australian National University and University of New South Wales, and undergraduate studies at University of Adelaide.

His research group works across the disciplines of chemistry (synthesis, structure, reaction mechanisms), biochemistry (enzyme inhibitors, protein-protein interactions, GPCRs, transcription factors), immunology (innate immune cells in health and disease, mucosal T cells), and pharmacology (molecular pharmacology and human cell signalling, experimental pharmacology in rodent models of human diseases). He has published over 450 scientific journal articles in high impact chemistry journals (e.g. Chem Rev, J Am Chem Soc, Angew Chem Int Edit, Chem Sci, J Med Chem, Org Lett, J Org Chem) and biology journals (e.g. Nature, Science, Nature Immunology, Immunity, Science Immunology, Nature Communications, J Exp Med, J Clin Invest, Proc Natl Acad Sci, Diabetes, Cancer Res, Br J Pharmacol). He has been a Highly Cited Researcher (Clarivate Analytics), with over 37,000 citations and 104 publications with over 100 citations (Google Scholar), and has collaborated with many of the world’s largest pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.