Event Date
Elizabeth Villa, Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Professor of Molecular Biology, School of Biological Sciences, UC San Diego, presents "Discovering New Jumbo Phage Biology with Cryo-Electron Tomography".
Elizabeth Villa completed her Ph.D. in Biophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Fulbright Fellow and became a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich. She was recruited to UC San Diego in 2014. Dr. Villa was the recipient of an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award to pursue high-risk high-reward research developing cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) and new technological and computational techniques to advance structural cell biology. She was named a Pew Scholar in 2017, and she was selected to become a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2021. Her lab builds tools for quantitative cell biology, using cryo-electron microscopy and tomography, cell biophysics, computational analysis, and integrative modeling. They use these tools to study biological processes in three areas: (1) unveiling key cellular processes in bacteria; (2) studying the molecular architecture of the nuclear periphery and its association to the nuclear envelope; and (3) determining the in situ molecular networks of the LRRK2 protein in Parkinson’s Disease.
Host: Maria Maldonado (mmaldo@ucdavis.edu)