Antoniya Aleksandrova PhD, MA

Antoniya Aleksandrova received her B.A. degree in Physics and Mathematics from Williams College, M.A., and earned her Ph.D. in Physics as a Herchel Smith Fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK. During her time at Cambridge, she became fascinated with membrane proteins while working with Edmund Kunji at the Medical Research Council Mitochondrial Biology Unit. Her dissertation focused on the selectivity and transport mechanism of the mitochondrial ADP/ATP carrier using modeling and simulations. Her work on the ADP/ATP carrier taught her about the value of structural pseudo-symmetry for understanding function, so she joined the Forrest Lab at NINDS to further explore this connection.

During her postdoctoral training, she has contributed to projects elucidating the transport mechanism of two pseudo-symmetric secondary transporters with similar folds (LeuT and SERT), in close collaboration with experimental scientists. Her primary research focus has been developing the EncoMPASS database and method for automatically detecting symmetry and pseudo-symmetry in membrane proteins, and analyzing the emerging patterns and their implications for function and evolution. As a founding member of the Neurobiology Interest Group at the NIH, she appreciates the physiological relevance of membrane proteins and believes in the importance of studying them through multi-disciplinary approaches.