Council Member
Elected by Academic staff.
Term expires 31 December 2023.
Associate Professor Gökhan Tolun is an academic in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Bioscience and a research group leader in the Molecular Horizons Research Institute at UOW. He has a B.S. in biology, M.Sc. in biotechnology, and a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology. He then received his postdoctoral training at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and National Institutes of Health (MD, USA), after which he joined UOW in 2018.
His specialised expertise is cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), which is a technique used for determining the 3D structures of biological macromolecules at the atomic level. His main biological research area of interest is studying bio-nano-machines carrying out processes involving nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), using his molecular imaging and structural biology expertise and his background in biochemistry. His research has been published in high-impact peer-reviewed journals and featured in public media outlets, such as newspapers, radio and websites (news, blog, podcast).
Assoc. Prof. Tolun has also been involved in education of thousands of students. He teaches several subjects covering a variety of topics, such as structural biology, molecular biology, genetics, and bioinformatics to name a few. He also supervises PhD, honours and undergraduate students in running research projects.
Furthermore, he serves in various governance roles. He is the UOW node leader for ARC Training Centre for Cryo-Electron Microscopy of Membrane Proteins for Drug Discovery (CCeMMP), NSW representative for CryOZ, UOW institutional representative for Sydney Protein Group, and a UOW Research Data Storage Management (RDSM) Workgroup member. Recently, he has been elected to the UOW Academic Senate as a faculty representative for SMAH, and also joined the UOW council as an elected academic staff member.
Gökhan is very enthusiastic about, and dedicated to, the main missions of our universities, that is educating the public and performing research for benefiting public.
