Speakers

Dr. Karen Davies is a staff scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Bioimaging Division at Berkeley Lab. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in Biophysics. Using electron cryo-tomography with sub-tomogram averaging together with single particle electron cryo-microscopy, she aims to determining how the structure and organization of proteins in situ influence cellular structure and function. Her lab focuses on understanding the biogenesis of bioenergetic compartments and how the structure of these compartments changes with changing environmental conditions such as light, temperature and nutrient availability.

Eva received her bachelor’s degree in physics from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). She did her graduate work at the Synchrotron Radiation Source and earned her doctorate in biophysics from the University of Keele (UK). She carried out her postdoctoral work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (USA), where she worked with Kenneth H Downing on the structure determination of tubulin by electron crystallography. She joined the University of California, Berkeley in 1998 and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2000. Presently she is a Senior Faculty Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

Eva’s research is dedicated to gaining mechanistic insight into the dynamics of the microtubule cytoskeleton during cell division and the regulation of gene expression at the transcriptional level using cryo-electron microscopy as a major tool.

Eva has been the recipient of the Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award from the Protein Society, the Mildred Cohn Award from the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the Keith R Porter Lecture Award from the American Society for Cell Biology and the LBNL Director’s Award for Exceptional Science Achievement. She is a Fellow of the American Society for Cell Biology and the Biophysical Society, an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and an elected associate member of EMBO. In 2020 she serves as President of the American Society for Cell Biology.

Andrej Sali received his BSc degree in chemistry from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1987, working on the sequence-structure-function relationship of stefins and cistatins under the supervision of Professor Vito Turk; and his PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London, UK, in 1991, developing the MODELLER program for comparative modeling of protein structures under the supervision of Professor Tom L. Blundell. He was then a postdoc with Professor Martin Karplus at Harvard University as a Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund fellow, studying lattice Monte Carlo models of protein folding. From 1995 to 2002, he was first an Assistant Professor and then an Associate Professor at The Rockefeller University. In 2003, he moved to University of California, San Francisco, as a Professor of Computational Biology in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, and California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). He was recognized as Sinsheimer Scholar (1996), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow (1998), an Irma T. Hirschl Trust Career Scientist (2000), the Zois Award of Science Ambassador of Republic of Slovenia (2007), a Fellow of International Society for Computational Biology (2014), Jubilee Professor of Indian Academy of Sciences (2017), Bijvoet Medal recipient (2018), and member of National Academy of Sciences of USA (2018). He has been an Editor of Structure since 2002. He is also a Founder of Prospect Genomix that merged with Structural Genomix (2001); and of Global Blood Therapeutics (2012). Dr. Sali develops and applies computational methods for determining and modulating structures and functions of proteins and their assemblies.

Click here to read more on his research interests.

David Shapiro leads the Microscopy Program, which manages the scanning transmission x-ray microscopes at beamlines 5.3.2.2, 7.0.1.2 and 11.0.2.2 at the Advanced Light Source.

More on Shapiro's background, research interests, and publications can be found here.

Gokul Upadhyayula uses applied engineering and basic science to build cutting-edge, adaptive optical multi-functional microscopes to enable imaging across scales spanning several orders of magnitude in space and time. As the scientific director at UC Berkeley’s Advanced BioImaging Center (ABC), Gokul's vision is to provide state-of-the-art microscopy, and dedicated human and hardware resources capable of handling terabyte to petabyte-scale projects. In addition to this, his mission is to develop robust, open-source computational workflows that allow scientists to extract biologically meaningful insights. His earlier work includes studying the charge transfer properties of cyanine dyes and bioinspired electrets using ultra-fast femtosecond spectroscopy during his time at the University of California, Riverside; and using lattice light-sheet microscopy (LLSM) with a high temporal and spatial resolution at the molecular level during his postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School / Boston Children’s Hospital.