PhD Student

Diaa joined the Gunning group in his third year of undergraduate studies. As an ROP student, he investigated strategies for improving the metabolic stability of drugs against oxidative metabolism in liver cells. He completed his senior thesis in the same lab working on covalent drug fragments used by the Gunning group to modulate drug reactivity for selective protein modification.

Diaa earned his Hons. BSc as a specialist in Biological Chemistry from the University of Toronto in 2020 and is now completing his doctorate at the Gunning Group. As a synthetic chemist, Diaa works on an array of projects involving the development of covalent inhibitors, bivalent degraders, and phosphorylation-inducing chimeric molecules. His work is highly relevant in fatal neurological conditions such brain cancers and Alzheimer’s disease.