Sara Al-Jarrah Seto (ESR8)
Sara was born in 1996, daughter of a Spanish mother and a Syrian father. Striving to be a contributing drug researcher and developer, she obtained the International Student Scholarship to study a BSc in Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (King Saud University, Riyadh) and achieved a 1st Class Honours Degree. During that time, Sara was awarded The Prize of the Dean’s List of Outstanding Students and worked, under Dr Fadilah Aleanizy’s supervision, on her BSc thesis which involved the formulation of nanocapsules for breast cancer dual therapy. Owing to that project she was named as a co-author of the published paper and won the 2nd best student poster award after presenting the project’s poster in the international DUPHAT conference (Dubai, UAE).
With an augmenting passion for oncology, immunology and drug development, she studied an MRes in Drug Design at UCL (2019-2020) and graduated with distinction. Supervised by Dr Alun Coker, Sara conducted two masters’ projects at the Centre for Inflammation and Tissue Repair on which she worked on expressing and purifying the recombinant protein PNPLA3 and applied the most recent methods and technological advancements to process old and problematic crystallographic datasets. As a result, she was nominated for the Dean’s Research Prize (UCL).
Currently, she has started her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Vanhaesebroeck (UCL, Cancer Institute) with the aim of understanding role of activated PI3Kδ mutations in cancer and with special interest in researching new ways to modulate PI3Kδ activity.