Lara Malins completed her undergraduate studies in chemistry at Boston University in 2009. She relocated to The University of Sydney as an International Postgraduate Research Scholar to undertake her PhD with Professor Richard Payne on the development of new peptide ligation strategies. Upon completion of her postgraduate work, Lara served as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) postdoctoral research fellow in the laboratory of Professor Phil Baran at The Scripps Research Institute, developing synthetic methods for the targeted modification of peptides. She was appointed Research Fellow at the Research School of Chemistry in November 2017 and currently holds an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA).