Antonina Roll-mecak PhD

Dr. Roll-Mecak is the Senior Investigator and Chief of the Unit of Cell Biology and Biophysics at the National Institutes of Health. She holds appointments in the NINDS as well as the Biophysics Center of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. She is a native of Romania and received her undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from The Cooper Union in New York City. She received her Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics from the Rockefeller University where she worked on the structure and mechanism of the two translation initiation GTPases essential for assembling an 80S ribosome primed for protein synthesis.

As a Damon Runyon postdoctoral fellow with Ron Vale at the University of California, San Francisco she identified a new microtubule-severing enzyme. She joined the National Institutes of Health in 2010. Her research program is dedicated to understanding how the genetic (isoform variation) and chemical diversity (posttranslational modifications) of tubulin regulates the dynamics and mechanical properties of microtubules and constitutes a code that is interpreted by microtubule based motors and associated proteins, i.e. a “tubulin code”.

Dr. Roll-Mecak is the recipient of several awards, including a Burroughs Wellcome Career Award, a Pathway to Independence Award from the NIH, a Searle Scholar Award, the 2015 Margaret Dayhoff Award from the Biophysical Society, the 2016 Emerging Leader Prize from the American Society for Cell Biology and was the 2017 Keith R. Porter fellow.