Anastasia Gazi

(EN)

Anastasia was lucky enough to be one of Prof. N. J. Panopoulos’ PhD students at University of Crete, Heraklion (2003-2007). She fall in love with the bacterial type III secretion systems (T3SS), admiring the evolution of protein nanomachines as strong as the evolution of the structural biology field itself. Thanks to Prof. M.I. Kokkinidis she visited DESY numerous times to collect data both on Small Angle X-ray Scattering and protein crystallography beamlines. In 2009 Anastasia attended what she believes is the best course for large experimental systems ever: the HERCULES course in Grenoble, where she visited ESRF, ILL and Soleil for the first time. The same year she got an EMBO short term fellowship to visit the group of Dr. Andrea Dessen @IBS, Grenoble. Still committed to T3SS, she joined the lab of Prof. P. Sansonetti end of 2010 to use Electron Microscopy (EM) as the main research methodology. A quick and dirty postdoc at a different field (biologically and methodologically -wise) then followed. In 2016 she had the pleasure to return to the historical Electron Microscopy facility of I. Pasteur, Paris thanks to a LABEX grant and to Prof. J. Krijnse-Locker. She was inspired heavily by the academic software SerialEM and decided that the EM field deserves her full attention. In 2018 she was hired by Dr. Yaser Hashem @IECB Pessac, based on his ERC grant as an EM research engineer for cryoEM data collections @TALOS Arctica. She had the pleasure to be the first to also collect cryoET data @IECB. Although she loved to work in Hashem’s team, I. Pasteur finally offered her a permanent contract the same year. Anastasia is deeply thankful to all people she met during this journey.