Update: The 23rd Fredric S. Fay Memorial Lecture has been postponed.
Elizabeth Villa, PhD
Photo: Erik Jepsen
Renowned cell biologist Elizabeth Villa, PhD, will present the 23rd Fredric S. Fay Memorial Lecture at UMass Chan Medical School on Thursday, Nov. 7.
The title of Dr. Villa’s presentation is, “Opening Windows into the Cell: Bringing structure into cell biology using cryo-electron tomography.”
Villa is professor of molecular biology at the University of California-San Diego and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute aInvestigator. Her career has been dedicated to developing a variety of imaging, data collection and computational tools for visualizing 3-D structures of bulky molecules.
Villa’s lab has developed a technique called cryo-FIB milling, which combines two-dimensional images into a 3-D tissue reconstruction with the goal of deriving their structure, context and interaction partners of macromolecular complexes to better understand function. By using cryo-FIB milling, her lab has studied a wide range of structures, including the nuclear basket in the outer perinuclear space, phage infection of bacteria and LRRK2, the major protein cause of familial Parkinson’s Disease.
Villa is the recipient of numerous awards including a Fulbright Fellowship, an NIH New Innovator Award, Pew Scholar and a Keith Porter Fellowship Award. Villa gives generously of her time to international diversity, equity and inclusion efforts for the Pew Latin American Fellows Program and for the HHMI Freeman Hrabowski Scholars Program. At University of California-San Diego, she serves as a mentor for the Women’s Organization for Research Mentoring in STEM, the Biology Undergraduate and Masters Mentorship Program, and on numerous departmental DEI committees.
The Fredric Fay lecture was established in remembrance of the late UMass Chan Medical School professor of physiology and his scientific contributions, particularly to the field of biomedical live imaging. The purpose of the lecture is to host a world-renowned scientist in physiological research who is also a great communicator and role model for the next generation of scientists.
The lecture is hosted by the Department of Microbiology and will be held at 3 p.m. in the Albert Sherman Center auditorium and on Zoom. A reception in the multipurpose room on the first floor of Albert Sherman Center will follow the lecture.
