James Murphy

Deputy Director and Professor at WEHI, Melbourne

James Murphy is a Deputy Director and Professor at WEHI in Melbourne, with a joint appointment in Drug Discovery Biology at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences. He studied at the University of Canterbury and Australian National University before postdoc training as a NHMRC CJ Martin Fellowship in the lab of the signalling guru, the late Tony Pawson (Toronto, Canada). He moved to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in 2007, was appointed group leader in January 2015 and, until recently, served as Head of the Inflammation Division (2019-2024).

His work has focused on signaling mechanisms and deconvoluting functions of protein kinases and their zombie cousins, the pseudokinases. He is highly engaged in learned society journals, including as Chair of the IUBMB Publications Committee; Editor-in-Chief of Biochemical Society Transactions; Associate Editor of Biochemical Journal; and he sits on the Editorial boards of JBC, Cell Death and Differentiation, Structure, IUBMB Life, Science Signaling and TIBS.