Ashleigh Burke

I received my PhD from the University of Manchester where I worked under the supervision of Prof. Anthony Green. During my PhD I designed and engineered an enzyme with a noncanonical organocatalytic mechanism. Following my PhD, I was supervised by Profs. Nick Turner and Anthony Green, where I worked in collaboration with The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and GSK engineering enzymes for use in medicines and manufacturing processes. In 2023, I moved to San Diego as a Postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Prof. Bradley Moore. As part of this fellowship, I discovered and characterized red algal enzymes involved in haloterpenoid biosynthesis and used an engineered P. putida strain as a tool for enzyme engineering. In 2025, I returned to Manchester as a research fellow and project manager in the group of Dr. Sarah Lovelock. Here I work on engineering enzymes for therapeutic oligonucleotide manufacturing and manage the NATA collaboration.