Academic Staff

Dr Luke Brennan is a Lecturer in Organic Chemistry in the School of Chemical and BioPharmaceutical Sciences at Technological University Dublin. His research lies at the interface of synthetic organic chemistry, medicinal chemistry and chemical biology, with a particular focus on developing new molecular tools to interrogate and manipulate biological systems.

Luke obtained his PhD in Organic Chemistry from Maynooth University, where his research focused on the development of synthetic supramolecular systems for antimicrobial applications. He subsequently joined the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut für Molekulare Pharmakologie (FMP) in Berlin as a Postdoctoral Fellow, developing activity-based probes and photocatalytic proximity-labelling strategies for bacterial systems. Prior to joining TU Dublin, he was a Research Ireland Accelerating Research to Commercialisation (ARC) Fellow at RCSI in Dublin, where he investigated metal-based therapeutics as programmable platforms for biomolecular targeting and damage.

At TU Dublin, Luke is establishing an independent research programme focused on the design of functional molecules for chemical biology and drug discovery. His research interests span bioorthogonal and proximity-driven chemistry, biological photocatalysis, antimicrobial chemical biology, and the development of transition-metal complexes as unconventional platforms for therapeutic intervention and chemical biology.

His group combines synthetic chemistry with biochemical, cellular and proteomic approaches to uncover molecular mechanisms of action and develop new strategies for interrogating challenging and understudied biological processes. A central theme of this research is the translation of fundamental molecular reactivity into new approaches for understanding biology and identifying opportunities for therapeutic intervention.