Associate Professor Thomas Ve is an ARC Future Fellow, a NHMRC Investigator and a Research Leader at the Institute for Glycomics, Griffith University.

Thomas completed his Masters degree in Molecular Biology at the University of Bergen, Norway, in 2006. In 2008, he relocated to Brisbane with his young family and started his PhD in structural biology under the supervision of Professor Bostjan Kobe at the University of Queensland. His PhD focused on plant disease resistance, and he used X-ray crystallography to determine 3D atomic structures of a plant immune receptor TIR domain and effector proteins from a fungal plant pathogen. After completing his PhD in 2011, Thomas continued working in the Kobe group as a postdoctoral research fellow and he collaborated with immunologists, cryoEM and single molecule experts to characterise TIR domain proteins involved in mammalian innate immunity.

Thomas joined Professor Mark von Itzstein’s group at the Institute for Glycomics, Griffith University, as a Research Scientist in 2015. In 2017, he received an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) and in 2020, he was awarded both an ARC Future Fellowship and a NHMRC Emerging Leadership Investigator Grant. Thomas has established his own independent research group at Griffith University, where he conducts innovative structural and chemical biology focused research across the fields of innate immunity and neurobiology.

Throughout his successful career, Thomas has published over 50 manuscripts in journals such as Science, Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, Molecular Cell, Neuron, Cell Host and Microbe, Nature Communications, PNAS and PLOS Pathogens.

Thomas’ research has been instrumental in providing a better mechanistic understanding of early events in Toll-like receptor signalling, how the pro-neurodegenerative NADase SARM1 is regulated, activated, and inhibited by small molecules, and how bacterial antiphage defence systems are activated by NAD+ derived secondary messengers. His research has led to new models for signal transduction in response to disease threats and is providing rational avenues for the design of new therapeutics to combat a range of neurodegenerative diseases.