Dr Godwin Aleku is a Lecturer in Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery within the Institute of Pharmaceutical Science in the School of Cancer and Pharmaceutical Sciences at King's College London.

Dr Aleku worked initially as a clinical pharmacist with a focus on infectious diseases and later as a senior regulatory affairs officer with the (Nigerian) National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control. He moved to the UK as a postgraduate student and completed an MSc in Biotechnology and Enterprise in 2013 at the University of Exeter.

Dr Aleku obtained a PhD in Chemical Biology in 2017, working with Professor Nicholas Turner FRS at the University of Manchester. He was a postdoctoral research associate at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology between 2017 and early 2020, in the group of Professor David Leys. Dr Aleku was an EMBO New Venture Fellow spending 3 months with Professor Roland Riek's lab at ETH Zurich. In mid-2020, he moved to the University of Cambridge where he was a Leverhulme/Isaac Newton Trust Early Career Research Fellow with Professor Florian Hollfelder at the Department of Biochemistry and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge.

Dr Aleku joined King's College in November 2022; he leads interdisciplinary research focusing on the development of clean enzyme-based sustainable pharmaceutical synthesis methods and the application of biocatalysis in drug discovery.  His research employs multidisciplinary approaches at the interface of organic chemistry, industrial biotechnology, and early-phase drug discovery.

His foundational work on the discovery and characterisation of Reductive Aminases (RedAms), alongside other follow-up developments in RedAm-catalysed reductive amination, has been recognised by a Royal Society Horizon Prize (Chemistry-Biology interface) in 2021.  His recent research work has received funding through grants/fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust and the Royal Society, and he was recently awarded an EPSRC New Investigator Award (2024).

Ongoing work in his lab are organised the following two themes: (A) Biocatalyst Discovery, Mechanism, Design, and Engineering for Pharmaceutical Synthesis, and (B) Functional Group Chemistry as a Model for the Inhibition of Enzyme Drug Targets.