Dr Mike Cahill

Biography

Dr Cahill completed a BSc (hons I) in Zoology and Biochemistry from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of NSW, Sydney, and subsequently obtained his PhD in Molecular Cell Biology (on proto-oncogene c-fos gene regulation and signal transduction) as an external student of the Department of Pathology, School of Medicine of the University of NSW. The laboratory work for his doctoral degree was performed in the group of Prof. Alfred Nordheim, who was then at the Institute of Molecular Biology at the Medizinische Hochschule Hannover, in Germany. After doing his PhD and follow-up postdoc work in Hannover he spent one year as a postdoctoral Scientist working on Fos-family gene regulation at The John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he was introduced through a guest lecture by Professor Keith Williams to the then emerging field of Proteomics. Working in the field of signal transduction, he was then trying to identify kinases that anonymously phosphorylated my target proteins, only to frustratingly vanish unidentified back into the cloaking shadows of the unchartered cytoplasm from whence they had appeared. This field of proteomics offered new strategies to tackle the biology cell signalling, and indeed the broad panorama of cell biology.

Research Interest

Biochemistry and Cell Biology