Paula da Fonseca

University of Glasgow, UK

Paula graduated in Biochemistry at the Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, and obtained her PhD in Biochemistry by the University of London, UK, for her studies at the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine. She held postdoctoral positions in London, at the Imperial College School of Medicine and at the Institute of Cancer Research. In 2013 Paula moved to Cambridge, UK, to start her own research group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. In April 2020 she relocated her group to the University of Glasgow, where she holds the position of Professor of Cryo-Electron Microscopy. Since her PhD, Paula has been studying regulatory protein complexes primarily by electron microscopy-based methods. Her current work focuses on studying the structure and function of eukaryotic proteasome complexes, with emphasis on fully understanding the different human variants. Additionally, she is investigating the use of high resolution cryo-EM in the development of new therapeutic drugs. Within this context, her cryo-EM work contributed to the validation of the Plasmodium proteasome as a potential target for antimalarials, and the structural information provided is now being harnessed in the development of Plasmodium proteasome inhibitors with improved specificity and potency.

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