Dr. Ben Clifton serves as a Lecturer (Teaching and Research) in the School of Molecular Sciences at the University of Western Australia, a position he assumed in January 2025. He is a protein biochemist whose research interests span structural biology, evolutionary biochemistry, biotechnology, and marine microbiology. His focused research areas include the discovery of new protein functions within the marine metagenome, the function and engineering of RNA-modifying enzymes, and the molecular mechanisms underlying functional evolution in proteins. Clifton contributes to education by coordinating and teaching key units such as Molecular Biology (BIOC3001), Structural and Functional Biochemistry (BIOC3002), Cellular Biochemistry (BIOC3005), Fundamentals of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology I (BIOC4002), and Genomics (GENE3370). He is actively accepting PhD students and other higher degree by research candidates, and holds an affiliation with the UWA Oceans Institute.

Clifton completed his PhB (Hons) degree in chemistry in 2012 and PhD in protein biochemistry in 2017 at the Australian National University. After his PhD, he joined Myrio Therapeutics from 2017 to 2019, first as Research Officer and later as Head of Protein Biochemistry, where he played a key role in developing antibodies representing a novel class of cancer immunotherapeutics. In 2020, he was awarded the JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship for Overseas Researchers, enabling him to work at the Protein Engineering and Evolution Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. His scholarly output includes high-impact publications such as 'The ultra-high affinity transport proteins of ubiquitous marine bacteria' (Nature, 2024), 'Evolutionary repair reveals an unexpected role of the tRNA modification m¹G37 in aminoacylation' (Nucleic Acids Research, 2021), 'Evolution of cyclohexadienyl dehydratase from an ancestral solute-binding protein' (Nature Chemical Biology, 2018), 'SUPREM: an engineered non-site-specific m⁶A RNA methyltransferase with highly improved efficiency' (Nucleic Acids Research, 2024), 'Efficient Exploration of Sequence Space by Sequence-Guided Protein Engineering and Design' (Biochemistry, 2023), 'The role of oligomerization in the optimization of cyclohexadienyl dehydratase conformational dynamics and catalytic activity' (Protein Science, 2022), and 'Functional and biophysical characterization of abundant transport proteins from SAR11 bacteria' (Seibutsu Butsuri, 2025). These contributions advance protein engineering, evolutionary mechanisms, and biotechnological innovations.

Professional Email: ben.clifton@uwa.edu.au