Biography
Max is an EMBL Australia Group leader in the Victorian Node, based in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Monash and an associate investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Advanced Molecular Imaging. After obtaining his PhD in chemistry from the University of Queensland in 2006, he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg as a Cross Disciplinary Fellow of the Human Frontiers Science Program. He was subsequently awarded funding from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) to establish his own group to investigate glycopeptide antibiotic biosynthesis as part of the Emmy Noether program. His group works at the boundary of chemistry and biology, where they apply a multidisciplinary approach including synthetic chemistry, biochemistry, structural biology and enzyme catalysis. In 2016 he joined EMBL Australia to continue his research into understanding the biosynthesis of important natural antibiotics and developing new antimicrobial agents, with his work supported by an NHMRC Career Development Fellowship since 2018.
