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. In addition to being named a member of the 2024 Class of Pew Biomedical Scholars, Mimi is the recipient of the DP5 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award.

As a graduate student, Mimi pioneered the use of single-particle cryoEM to elucidate the stuctures and mechanisms of endogenous malarial protein complexes purified directly from malaria parasites. She elucidated 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. Following this work, Mimi developed an endogenous structural proteomics approach for identification and structure determination of novel protein complexes enriched untagged from challenging endogenous sources, using mass spectrometry and near-atomic resolution cryoEM density maps reconstructed ab initio, and cryoID, a program she designed to semi-autonomously identify proteins in cryoEM maps of unknown protein complexes.

Research in Mimi’s Lab focuses on using a combination of single particle cryoEM, in situ cryoET, and membrane protein biochemistry to deepen our understanding of malarial parasite biology and to continue breaking down barriers to structural study of challenging non-model organisms of high medical importance.