About Antonina

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Antonina grew up surrounded by science and music. After completing her baccalaureate in Mathematics and Physics she studied engineering at Cooper Union in New York City. She fell in love with structural biology after attending a seminar on protein structures at the New York Academy of Science. She enrolled as a graduate student at Rockefeller University to pursue her interest in protein structure and function. She became fascinated by the intricate choreography of the ribosome as it prepares to start protein synthesis and studied this process as a NSF graduate fellow in the lab of Stephen Burley. Her work shed light on the structure and mechanism of the two GTPases, eIF2 and eIF5B, which are involved in delivering the initiator Met-tRNA on the ribosome and facilitating the joining of the small and large ribosomal subunits to commence translation of the mRNA. As she was nearing the end of her Ph.D. she decided that in order to understand protein function she needed to complement her structural biology skills with methods that capture protein dynamics in isolation as well as in the more complex environment of the cell. She decided to join Ron Vale’s lab at UCSF where she was a Damon Runyon fellow and then a Burroughs Wellcome Career Award recipient. While there, she identified spastin as a novel microtubule severing enzyme and used hybrid structural biology methods and light microscopy to shed light on its mechanism of action. Combining her interdisciplinary skills she started her own lab at the National Institutes of Health (NINDS with a joint appointment at NHLBI) focused on the tubulin code. Her lab is deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanism of action of the tubulin code using tools from biophysics, X-ray crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy and tomography, proteomics, cell biology, high-resolution light microscopy and modeling.  She has assembled a diverse team of scientists who draw from the fields of biology, chemistry, and physics.

Education and Training
The Cooper Union, B.E. in Chemical Engineering (1992-1996)
The Rockefeller University, Ph.D. in Molecular Biophysics with Stephen K. Burley (1996-2002)
University of California, San Francisco, postdoctoral fellow with Ronald D. Vale (2003-2009)
 
Awards and Funding
The Henry W. Reddick Fund Prize and Medal for meritorious work in mathematics (1996)
William C. & Esther Hoffman Beller Fund for merit in engineering studies (1996)
The Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship Grant (1997-1999)
National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship (1997 – 2000)
Burroughs Wellcome Fund Predoctoral Fellowship (2000 – 2002)
Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fund Postdoctoral Fellowship (2003 – 2006)
L’Oreal-AAAS For Women in Science Fellowship Award (2006)
American Heart Association Scientist Development Award (2006 – 2010; declined)
Larry L.Hillblom Foundation Fellowship Grant (2006)
K99/R00 NIH Pathway to Independence Award (2006 – 2011)
Burroughs Wellcome Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences (2006 – 2013, discontinued 2010)
Searle Scholar Award (2010-2013)
Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award from the Biophysical Society (2015)
Blavatnik National Science Finalist (2016)
Gibco Emerging Leader Prize from the American Society of Cell Biology (2016)
Keith R. Porter Fellow Award for Cell Biology (2017)
NINDS Director Award (2019)
NIH Director Award for service on the NIH Equity Committee (2019)
NINDS Director Award (2020)
International Award from the Biochemical Society (2023)

NIH Director's Innovation Challenge Award (2022-2024)