Madeleine Eaton

Madeleine earned her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Imperial College London in 2023. As an undergraduate, she conducted research in Professor David Mann’s lab, where she helped optimize a novel covalent fragment identification assay, quantitative irreversible tethering.  Her work focused on identifying drug fragment hits against KDM5a, an underexplored cancer target protein, to inform future drug discovery efforts against traditionally ‘undruggable’ target proteins. 

She went on to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Oxford, working jointly between Professors Jason Schnell & Lidia Vasilieva. There, she used NMR spectroscopy to study the interactions between the conserved transcription elongation factor Spt5, nascent RNA, and transcription termination machinery. Her research revealed new interactions that shift the current understanding of transcription termination.

As a result, Madeleine also became interested in how this fundamental biological mechanism of transcription is hijacked during viral infection. As an NIH Cambridge scholar, she plans to integrate structural biology approaches in Professor Yorgo Modis’s lab at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge with the functional virology work of Dr. Sonja Best at NIAID. Her research will focus on understanding how the dsRNA sensor MDA5 finetunes the immune response to distinguish between viral RNA and self-RNA to prevent autoimmunity. She ultimately hopes to contribute to an increased understanding of virus-host interactions as well as autoimmune conditions