Rate My Professor Lauren May

Lauren May is an Associate Professor in Drug Discovery Biology at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences within the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Monash University. She serves as Group Leader and Co-Director of the Cardiac GPCR Biology laboratory, leading a multidisciplinary program that employs innovative approaches to G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) drug discovery. Her research centers on adenosine receptors, developing biased agonists and allosteric modulators to enhance cardioprotective signaling pathways while minimizing adverse effects such as reduced heart rate and hypotension. This work addresses key challenges in cardiovascular therapeutics, where cardiovascular disease remains a leading cause of death in Australia. May earned her PhD in 2007 and held the Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellowship from 2018 to 2022. Her career at Monash has progressed from Senior Lecturer and Group Leader to her current associate professorship, contributing to projects on protein structure modeling for GPCR-targeted therapies in heart failure, adenosine receptor modulators for epilepsy, and inflammation in kidney disease.

May's scholarly impact is evidenced by over 6,000 citations on Google Scholar in the field of pharmacology. Key publications include 'Structure-based discovery of positive allosteric modulators of the A1 adenosine receptor' (2025), 'Molecular basis of ligand binding and receptor activation at the human A3 adenosine receptor' (2025), 'Large language models for scientific discovery in molecular property prediction' (2025, 50 citations), 'Biased receptor signalling and intracellular trafficking profiles of structurally distinct formylpeptide receptor 2 agonists' (2024), and 'Development of Putative Bivalent Dicovalent Ligands for the Adenosine A1 Receptor' (2024). She co-developed PSICHIC, an AI tool for rapid drug discovery using physicochemical graph neural networks (2024). May holds editorial positions including board member for npj Drug Discovery (2024-present), Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (2022-2025), and Associate Editor for Purinergic Signalling (2022-present), as well as Guest Editor for the British Journal of Pharmacology (2024). She also serves as a peer reviewer for the NHMRC Ideas Grant Review Panel (2024). Her contributions advance GPCR pharmacology and precision medicine in cardiovascular and neurological disorders.