Scientific Organisers

Atlanta Cook did her PhD in Oxford, working on structural studies of protein kinases, before moving to the EMBL in Heidelberg to take up a postdoctoral position with Elena Conti. There her focus was on the structures of nuclear export complexes. Part way through her postdoc, the lab moved to the MPI for Biochemistry in Martinsred, near Munich. In 2011 she started her independent group in the Wellcome Centre for Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh, initially on an MRC Career Development Award. She is now a Wellcome Senior Research Fellow, investigating transcriptional and post-transcriptional control of gene expression by studying the structures of protein-protein and protein-nucleic acid complexes. 

Anastassis (Tassos) Perrakis is a group leader at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and the Oncode Institute, Professor of Macromolecular Structures at the University of Utrecht, and coordinator of iNEXT-Discovery, a Horizon2020 project bringing together European structural biology facilities (X-ray beamlines, cryo-EMs, NMRs and Biophysics). Biologist according to his bachelor degree from Athens, Chemist according to his DPhil from the University of York, he naturally identifies as a Biochemist, and his interests are shared between integrative approaches to structural biology problems and methods development for X-ray crystallography. As to the latter, he has contributed to the establishment of high throughput methods for crystallisation; to using microcrystals and the design of the first microdiffractometer; to the ARP/WARP package for macromolecular model building; and to the PDB-REDO re-refinement and re-building project.

Dan trained as a biochemist and worked as a protein crystallographer for a while until switching to protein bioinformatics. These days - in the Institute for Systems, Molecular and Integrative Biology at the University of Liverpool - he works with protein structural bioinformatics. This relates partly to protein function annotation, but mainly to applications of evolutionary covariance in structural biology, especially in molecular replacement. Development of CCP4 programs AMPLE, SIMBAD, ConKit, and now MrBUMP is centred in his group.