Rate My Professor Megan O'Mara

Professor Megan O'Mara is a Professor and Senior Group Leader at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) in the Faculty of Science at the University of Queensland. Her interdisciplinary research at the interface of chemistry, biology, physics, and computer science utilizes multiscale simulations and high-performance computing to elucidate how the biochemical environment of cell membranes influences membrane properties and protein function. She investigates membrane biophysics, computational lipidomics, cell membrane alterations in health, disease, and senescence, multidrug resistance mechanisms in antimicrobial and cancer chemotherapy contexts, computational structural biology of membrane proteins, computational drug design including structure-based and fragment-based approaches, biopolymers, molecular self-assembly, and personalized medicine. O'Mara earned a Bachelor of Applied Science from the University of Canberra, a Bachelor of Physical Sciences, and a PhD in biophysics from the Australian National University in 2005.

Following her PhD, O'Mara held a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Calgary from 2005 to 2009, focusing on membrane protein structural dynamics. She returned to Australia as a UQ Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences (SCMB) from 2009 to 2012, then as an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow there from 2012 to 2015. In 2015, she joined the Research School of Chemistry at the Australian National University as Rita Cornforth Fellow and Senior Lecturer, promoted to Associate Professor in 2019, and served as Associate Director (Education) from 2019 to 2021. Since April 2022, she has led her group at AIBN. Notable awards include the Rita Cornforth Fellowship and ARC DECRA. She is Associate Editor for RSC Advances, Vice-President of the Association of Molecular Modellers of Australasia, and former Secretary of the Australian Society for Biophysics. Key publications encompass 'The ryanodine receptor store-sensing gate controls Ca2+ waves and Ca2+-triggered arrhythmias' (Nature Medicine, 2014), 'Imperfect coordination chemistry facilitates metal ion release in the Psa permease' (Nature Chemical Biology, 2014), 'Lipid-mediated antimicrobial resistance: a phantom menace or a new hope?' (Biophysical Reviews, 2022), and 'Computational lipidomics reveals environment-specific membrane remodeling in prostate cancer' (Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, 2025). Her work impacts drug delivery, antimicrobial resistance, and biomolecular simulations.