James Murphy completed his undergraduate studies in his home town of Christchurch, New Zealand, before completing his PhD studies at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia in 2003. As a CJ Martin Fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC), he completed postdoctoral training in the lab of the signalling guru, the late Tony Pawson (Toronto, Canada). He moved to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in 2007 and was appointed group leader in the Cell Signalling and Cell Death Division in January 2015 and promoted to Associate Professor in 2017. Supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2011-4) and an NHMRC RD Wright Biomedical Fellowship (2016-9), he has pursued a mechanistic understanding of the roles of several pseudokinases, protein kinases, cytokines/receptors and epigenetic regulators in signal transduction, with a particular focus on MLKL, a key pseudokinase in the necroptosis cell death pathway. These studies have culminated in >100 publications to date.