Franziska Guenther

I joined the Oxford Drug Discovery Institute in collaboration with the Wade-Martins’ lab in 2018 as a Postdoctoral Research Scientist. My research targets the Ubiquitination pathway in Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and currently I am using biochemical and biophysical approaches to investigate and identify potential new selective deubiquitinating enzyme inhibitor compounds as a therapeutically treatment of PD.

I gained my scientific background in Molecular Cell Biology and Molecular Medicine at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, where I obtained my B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree and then completed a PhD in Neurophysiology in collaboration with King`s College London.

For my doctoral studies, I investigated sensory transduction mechanisms and their importance for nociception and pain on TRP channels. In particular, I investigated the role of the ion-channel TRPA1 in diabetic neuropathy as well as targeting TRPA1 for drug discovery using a wide range of techniques including patch clamp electrophysiology and Ca²⁺ imaging.