Postdoctoral fellow Anastasiia Sukalskaia has received a prestigious Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Postdoc.Mobility Fellowship, which will support her research in the lab of MCB’s Nicholas Bellono on the sensory biology of starfish.
Sukalskaia joined the Bellono Lab in September after completing her PhD at the University of Zurich in the group of Raimund Dutzler, where she investigated a previously mysterious group of human membrane proteins and discovered that they transport lipids in endosomes with the help of apolipoproteins. Her PhD findings were recently published in Nature.
During her PhD, Sukalskaia became increasingly curious about how the molecular functions she studied connect to the biology of whole organisms. “I spent a lot of time during my PhD working with purified proteins, which is fascinating but was a little bit out of physiological context,” she says. “For my postdoc, I was looking for a lab where molecular understanding of membrane protein biophysics is combined with trying to understand these proteins in the context of whole organisms. Nick is one of the few people in the world who works on such interdisciplinary projects, interrogating biological systems on many levels of organization from molecules to organisms.”
