Akane Kawamura is a Chair and Professor of Chemical Biology at Newcastle University. After obtaining M.Chem and D.Phil degrees at University of Oxford, she worked in the biotech sector where she led a number of drug discovery projects across a wide range of therapeutic areas. In 2009 she returned to Oxford as a senior postdoctoral scientist under Prof. Chris Schofield FRS. She was awarded a BHF CRE Senior Research Fellowship (2012-2015) and a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship (2013-2018), and established her group in the Department of Chemistry and the Radcliffe Department of Medicine. She joined Newcastle University in 2019. Her group’s research focuses on understanding the chemistry of epigenetic regulation, chemical probes development against epigenetic modifying enzymes, and the development of cyclic peptide-based target validation approaches.