Oct 7, 2024

Welcome Dr. Nathanael Caveney, Assistant Professor, Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology

Faculty News
Dr. Nathanael Caveney
Dr. Nathanael Caveney

The Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology is pleased to welcome Dr. Nathanael Caveney, Assistant Professor effective October 1, 2024.

Dr. Caveney is a structural biologist who focuses on the molecular physiology of cellular signalling. He completed his BSc (Biochemistry, 2015) at the University of Victoria where he initially pursued the structural characterisation of the anti-chlamydial immune response. He completed his PhD (Biochemistry, 2020) at the University of British Columbia. At UBC Dr. Caveney characterised key enzymatic steps which build the bacterial cell wall and laid the foundation for further development of novel antibacterial agents. 

Following graduate school, Nathanael was a CIHR postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford University School of Medicine. There, he brought the emerging technique of cryogenic-electron microscopy to the field of cellular signalling and structurally characterised numerous signalling mechanisms of the immune system and broader human physiology, from IL-17 to leptin. Beyond this, he pursued the development of engineered orthologous signalling mechanisms and used these systems to tease apart the intricate physiology of cellular signalling.

Dr. Caveney will build an interdisciplinary research program centred around structural biology, protein engineering, signal engineering, and therapeutic design. Broadly, this work aims to understand and build a toolkit of molecules and pathways that can be implemented to therapeutically modulate cellular signalling across a range of pathologies. This will benefit patients suffering from numerous diseases including inflammatory disorders, cancer, metabolic disease, and diabetes.