Ellen completed her BA (mod) in Chemistry in Trinity College Dublin in 2019. During her undergraduate degree, she undertook her final year research project in the McGouran Group. Ellen returned to the group in September 2019 to pursue a PhD focusing on the development of activity based probes for DNA damage repair enzymes. These poorly understood enzymes play a key role in cancer chemotherapy resistance. Activity based probes are useful tools for the examination of the behaviour of these enzymes in their native environment as well as for identifying potential enzyme inhibitors.