INSIDE CORONA - Key Persons

Alexander Matthew Payne

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Chemical Biology Ph.D. Student

Cameron Fyfe

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Postdoctoral Research Associate
Postdoctoral Research Associate / Micalis Institute

Cameron is a structural biologist who has worked extensively on proteins from microorganisms. With many years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry and in structural biology research, he joined the Task Force to contribute his skills to improve existing models for drug development. He is currently researching Radical SAM enzymes at INRAE. When not in the laboratory he can be found hunting mushrooms in the forest.

Dale E. Tronrud

Job Titles:

Research Scientist
AlphaFold - a Game Changer in Structural Biology

Dale Tronrud has both solved protein crystal structures and developed methods and software for the optimization of macromolecular models against X-ray data and known chemical structural information. He has had a long-standing interest in enzyme:inhibitor complexes and photosynthetic proteins, focusing on the Fenna-Matthews-Olson protein. In addition, he has also been involved in the validation and repair of many PDB models. Getting the chemistry right has been critical to all these projects. And this is exactly what Dale also does in the Task Force. He also occasionally teaches the other members some the secrets of crystallographic refinement.

David Briggs

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Principal Laboratory Research Scientist
Principal Laboratory Research Scientist / Francis Crick Institute in London
Research Scientist in the Signalling and Structural Biology Lab at the Francis Crick Institute

David Briggs is a Principal Laboratory Research Scientist in the Signalling and Structural Biology lab at the Francis Crick Institute in London, UK. A crystallographer by training, his work focuses on the biophysical and structural characterisation of human extracellular proteins involved in the synapse, which have important ramifications in both psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. He is also involved in structure-based drug design projects targeting receptor tyrosine kinases that are involved in various metastatic disorders and has a track record of working on difficult, highly modified targets. He is one of the macromolecular crystallography reps on the Diamond Light Source User Committee.

Dr. Agnel Praveen

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Computational Scientist
Computational Scientist / Science and Technology Facilities Council
Scientist in the CCP - EM Team at the Science

Dr. Agnel Praveen works as a computational scientist in the CCP-EM team at the Science and Technology Facilities Council, UK. He is interested in approaches to interpret and validate maps and atomic models derived from Cryo-EM data and looks also into computational methods for the interpretation of Cryo-ET data. In collaboration with five other sites in the UK, he is involved in the development and implementation of a user-friendly interface in a CCP-EM software package for validation at different resolution ranges. In the Task Force, Agnel is mostly involved with the validation of Cryo-EM structures.

Dr. Andrea Thorn

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Group Leader
Group Leader / Institute for Nanostructure and Solid - State Physics
Specialist for Crystallography and Cryo - EM

Andrea is a specialist for crystallography and Cryo-EM structure solution, having contributed to programs like SHELX, ANODE and (a little bit) to PHASER in the past. Her group develops the diffraction diagnostics tool AUSPEX, a neural network for secondary structure annotation of Cryo-EM maps (HARUSPEX) and enables other scientists to solve problem structures. Andrea is very passionate about structural biology and good at bringing people together. This is (among other things) why she is the main coordinator of this project.

Erik Nebelung

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Institute for Nanostructure and Solid - State Physics, Hamburg University

Florens Fischer

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Biology M.Sc. Student

Gianluca Santoni

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Serial Crystallography Data Scientist

Helen Ginn

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Senior Research Scientist

Holger Theymann

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Leadership Coach

Johannes Kaub

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Scientific Coordinator
Scientific Coordinator / Institute for Nanostructure and Solid - State Physics

Johannes Kaub studied chemistry at RWTH Aachen, with a focus on solid-state physical chemistry, before serving as a scientific employee at the Max Planck Instiute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter. He supports the Coronavirus Structural Task Force as a scientific coordinator with his organizing ability and his talent for solving problems. Other than science, his greatest passion is the written word, and due to this he is also a member of the editorial board on the most well-known German table top RPG.