Our Team

Biography

Dr Michelle Sahai is originally from the twin island republic of Trinidad and Tobago. After emigrating to Toronto, Canada with her family she completed her first two degrees at the University of Toronto, before moving to the UK where she received her DPhil in Biochemistry from the Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Biochemistry Unit at the University of Oxford. Subsequent to receiving her PhD degree, she carried out postdoctoral research at the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, at the Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY. The formative experiences in these laboratories have fostered and consolidated her interest in the molecular mechanisms which underpin drug actions in biological systems. From 2014 - 2023, Dr. Sahai was a Lecturer at the University of Roehampton. Since 2024 she has been a Lecturer in Biosciences (Drug Discovery) at Brunel University London. Her laboratory focuses on important questions relating to membrane proteins and the structural, dynamic and electronic determinants of biological processes underlying physiological functions. Her current research involves computational studies on the interactions between new psychoactive substances (NPS, formerly ‘legal highs’) and their biological targets, specifically the dopamine transporter. It is important to emphasise that this computational work is combined with experimental probing and validation in close collaboration with experimental laboratories.