Dean's Seminar Series

Lunch will be provided for those who attend in-person.

Dr. Meg Phillips is a parasitologist recognized for her work on exploiting metabolic pathways in protozoan parasites for drug discovery. Her work on the pyrimidine biosynthetic pathway in the malaria parasite led to the identification of an inhibitor of dihydroorotate dehydrogenase that reached clinical development for the treatment of malaria, for which she received the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) Project of the Year Award for this work in 2010. She also has extensive publications on the polyamine metabolic pathway in Trypanosoma brucei, the causative agent of sleeping sickness. She identified novel regulatory mechanisms for two enzymes in the pathway, S-adenosylmethionine decarboxylase and deoxyhypusine synthase, finding that both enzymes require oligomerization with inactive paralogs for activity. Phillips graduated from the University of California, Davis with a B.S. in Biochemistry in 1981, and with a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry in 1988 from the University of California, San Francisco, where she was also a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biochemistry. She joined the faculty of UT Southwestern in the Department of Pharmacology as an assistant professor in 1992, was promoted to tenured associate professor in 1997, and to full professor in 2002. She became Chair of the Department of Biochemistry at UT Southwestern in 2016 and holds the Sam G. Winstead and F. Andrew Bell Distinguished Chair in Biochemistry.  She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021, elected as a fellow of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and elected to the fellowship of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2022.