Rachel Harding

Rachel Harding is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto and a Principal Investigator at the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), where her research focuses on developing chemical tools and new therapeutic strategies for challenging protein targets. Her laboratory combines protein biochemistry, biophysics, structural biology and chemical biology to understand protein function and enable early-stage drug discovery, with a particular interest in proteins implicated in rare neurodegenerative diseases. As part of the SGC and the Target 2035 initiative, Rachel is helping develop scalable approaches for discovering chemical matter across the human proteome. This comprises an integrated pipeline spanning high-throughput protein production, assay-readiness quality control, affinity-selection mass spectrometry and DNA encoded library screening platforms, orthogonal biophysical validation and cellular studies. This work aims both to deliver first-in-class ligands for understudied p