Margaret Brimble
Margaret Brimble is a distinguished New Zealand chemist currently serving as the Director of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Auckland. Dr. Brimble studied at the University of Auckland before being awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to obtain her PhD at the University of Southampton. Her research focuses on two major areas: the synthesis of natural products and peptide chemistry. She has published over 460 papers, 60 reviews and 30 patents. Dr. Brimble has achieved numerous accolades such as the 2016 Marsden Medal, 2012 RSNZ Rutherford (NZ’s top science prize), MacDiarmid and Hector Medals, 2011 Royal Australian Chemical Institute Adrien Albert Award, 2015 IUPAC Distinguished Women in Chemistry Award and conferred the Queen’s Honor CNZM in 2012 for service to science. In addition to her numerous awards, she is also the co-founder of the can immunotherapy company SapVax that has licensed her CLipPA peptide lipidation technology to develop self-adjuvanting peptide-based cancer vaccines. Her peptide chemistry laboratory is New Zealand’s only laboratory accredited by Medsafe to manufacture peptides under cGMP for human clinical trial.