Associate Professor Nadia Zatsepin

Biography

Dr Zatsepin’s research focuses on the development and application of serial crystallography with X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) and synchrotron sources. XFEL serial femtosecond crystallography has revolutionized structural biology by enabling atomic-resolution structure determination from difficult-to-crystallize biomolecules at ambient temperature, as well as the study of their structural dynamics down to the femtosecond time scale. One of the biggest impacts of Dr Zatsepin’s work was facilitating the determination of structures of membrane proteins, which are involved in energy production, cell signaling, responsible for all of our senses, implicated in numerous diseases, and comprise half of the targets of current pharmaceutical drugs.

Dr Zatsepin completed her PhD in X-ray physics at Monash University in 2011, was recruited to Arizona State University as a Postdoctoral Fellow. As an Assistant Professor (Research) in 2015, she launched her independent research career as lead Chief Investigator of a US National Science Foundation (NSF) grant on “New algorithms for biological X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) data” and led XFEL data analysis in the NSF Science and Technology Centre "XFELs for Biology" (https://www.bioxfel.org/). She then returned to Australia as a Senior Research Fellow in the ARC Centre for Advanced Molecular Imaging and La Trobe Institute for Molecular Sciences, before joining Swinburne in 2024 with an ARC Future Fellowship on "Developing serial crystallography for room temperature structure and dynamics".

Lab website: https://sites.google.com/view/zatsepinlab 
Full publication list: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=zYC2VMkAAAAJ&hl=en