Personal Bio

Mimi was born and raised in Ames, IA, where she first discovered her love of protein structure and function as a summer research intern in the lab of Professor Gloria Culver at Iowa State University. After earning her B.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, she joined the lab of Professor Robert Stroud at the University of California, San Francisco and worked on membrane protein structure determination. In 2011 she was recruited to the Infectious Diseases Division at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Emeryville, CA, where she worked for three years in small molecule drug discovery for infectious diseases before moving on to pursue a doctoral degree in 2014. She completed her Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Biophysics & Structural Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019, under the mentorship of Professor Hong Zhou. She joined the faculty of the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at Columbia University in January 2020.

Mimi’s doctoral work focused on using single-particle cryoEM to elucidate the structure and mechanism of an essential malarial membrane protein complex known as the Plasmodium Translocon of Exported Proteins (PTEX), which she purified directly from malaria parasites via an epitope tag inserted into the endogenous locus of a PTEX subunit using CRISPR-Cas9. Her lab uses biochemistry and the latest developments in cryo electron microscopy to study the molecular basis of host-pathogen interactions.