Announcing the Establishment of the Institute for Structural Biology (ISB)
May 11, 2023
To:Penn Medicine Faculty and Staff
From:J. Larry Jameson, MD, PhD
EVP/Dean
Jonathan A. Epstein, MD
Executive Vice Dean & Chief Scientific Officer
Re: Announcing the Establishment of the Institute for Structural Biology (ISB)
We are pleased to announce the establishment of the Institute for Structural Biology (ISB) at the Perelman School of Medicine (PSOM), led by Dr. Vera Moiseenkova-Bell, Professor in the Department of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics.
The creation of the ISB recognizes the critical role of structural biology in advancing basic and translational biomedical science. It reflects the growing community of researchers and scholars at PSOM who are dedicated to advancing this crucial field of study.
The ISB will focus on the study of proteins, nucleic acids, and other biomolecules, with the goal of understanding how they function and interact with one another in living organisms. By using advanced structural biology and computational techniques, the Institute aims to unravel the complex structures and dynamics of these molecules and provide insights into how they contribute to disease and other biological processes. The Institute will also serve as a hub for training and education in structural biology, providing opportunities for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early-career researchers to gain hands-on experience with the latest techniques and methods.
Since her arrival to Penn in 2018, Dr. Moiseenkova-Bell has helped nucleate the PSOM structural biology community. As a membrane protein biochemist and a structural biologist with expertise in cryo-EM, she serves as Faculty Director of the Beckman Cryo-EM Center and Electron Microscopy Resource Laboratory. Her research is focused on structure-function analysis of Transient Receptor Potential (TRP) channels and their interaction with agonists/antagonists to enhance our understanding of their function at the molecular level. In addition, her laboratory research program seeks to understand how TRP channels regulate cellular functions and the role of their dysregulation in human disease.
The ISB will catalyze novel advances in the areas of structural biology, meet structural biology needs on the UPenn campus, and promote collaborative studies across the biomedical community. We thank Dr. Moiseenkova-Bell for her leadership and anticipate exciting discoveries emerging from the Institute's research, along with the potential to revolutionize our understanding of life's fundamental processes.
We invite you to learn more about the work of the ISB via the Structural Biology Program website and through this video: