Mimi was born and raised in Ames, IA, where she first discovered her love of protein structure and function as a summer research intern in the lab of Professor Gloria Culver at Iowa State University. After earning her B.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, she joined the lab of Professor Robert Stroud at the University of California, San Francisco and worked on membrane protein structure determination. In 2011 she was recruited to the Infectious Diseases Division at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Emeryville, CA, where she worked for three years in small molecule drug discovery for infectious diseases before moving on to pursue a doctoral degree in 2014. She completed her Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Biophysics & Structural Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019, under the mentorship of Professor Hong Zhou. She joined the faculty of the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at Columbia University in January 2020.

Mimi’s doctoral work focused on using single-particle cryoEM to elucidate the structure and mechanism of an essential malarial membrane protein complex known as the Plasmodium Translocon of Exported Proteins (PTEX), which she purified directly from malaria parasites via an epitope tag inserted into the endogenous locus of a PTEX subunit using CRISPR-Cas9. Research in her lab focuses on understanding how membrane protein complexes mediate host-pathogen interactions of malaria parasites, using single-particle cryo electron microscopy (cryoEM) and in situ cryo electron tomography (cryoET). In pursuit of this, her lab develops and applies novel approaches that combine cutting-edge techniques in malaria parasite gene-editing, single-particle cryoEM, and in situ cryoET to overcome longstanding barriers to high resolution structural study in malaria parasites.

When she’s not in the lab, Mimi is a huge foodie and enjoys exploring new spaces with her dog, Mighty.

Email: chi-min.ho@columbia.edu

Website: cmholab.org

Twitter: @mimi1inh

Mike was born and raised in Oneida, NY, a small town in central New York. Growing up in a household with parents who worked in not-for-profit community organizations, Mike saw how public-facing institutions - like higher education - can have long-ranging positive impacts on individuals. A trait that likely influenced his drive to help the cryo-EM community.

After graduating with a degree in Biochemistry from Providence College, Mike moved to the University of California, Berkeley, for a Ph.D. in Biophysics with Eva Nogales to determine how the human transcription factor complex TFIID interacts with promoter DNA using cryo-EM. Mike's Ph.D. work allowed him to dive deep into nearly all software available in cryo-EM to discover that TFIID rearranged when binding to promoter DNA, a finding that did not need high-resolution but careful image analysis. While in Eva Nogales' lab, Mike learned to appreciate the complexity and importance of the microtubule cytoskeleton and the vast world of motor protein cargo trafficking that (still) remains poorly understood.

As a post-doctoral fellow, Mike dove into the world of microtubule motor proteins while maintaining a solid cryo-EM footing by working as a Damon Runyon Foundation fellow in the labs of Sam Reck-Peterson and Andres Leschziner. While a post-doc, Mike used cryo-EM to determine mechanisms of cytoplasmic dynein regulation and leverage public cloud computing tools for cryo-EM image analysis.

Mike's post-doc work has set the stage for his independent career. Since 2017, Mike has led a research laboratory at the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan, where they determine how intracellular cargoes recruit and regulate motor proteins for trafficking using cryo-EM and single molecule fluorescence assays. In parallel, Mike has leaned into his cryo-EM expertise to build cloud computing infrastructure and algorithms to remove barriers faced by newcomers to the cryo-EM field.

Outside the lab, Mike has a family with two kids in elementary school and is an avid vegetable gardener, cook, coffee roaster, and beer brewer.

Email: mcianfro@umich.edu

Website: https://www.lsi.umich.edu/science/our-labs/michael-cianfrocco-lab

Twitter: @mcianfro

Liz was born in sunny California, in the bay area. She attended UC Berkeley intending to be pre-med but fell in love with Computer Science, Bioinformatics, and Physical Chemistry, graduating summa cum laude from the Bioengineering department in 2006. Fascinated by computational algorithms to solve the protein structure prediction problem, she pursued her Ph.D. with David Baker at the University of Washington, graduating in 2012. Sensing that the time was right for cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM), she did her postdoctoral fellowship with Eva Nogales at UC Berkeley to solve a number of important biological questions surrounding microtubule structure. Most notably she determined the structure of tubulin-bound tau (Science 2018).

Liz started the Kellogg lab at Cornell in 2019. Her group focuses on revealing the molecular mechanisms that regulate transposon insertion. She is particularly interested in newly discovered transposons called “CRISPR-associated transposons”. Her group is currently working hard to understand how these elements function and how to use them for genome-editing.

Email: lizkellogg@gmail.com

Website: kellogglab.org

Twitter: @kellogg_liz