Ekaterina is primarily interested in understanding molecular interactions at the atomic level employing a variety of structural biology and biophysical techniques, with the ultimate goal of developing applications of medical relevance. She received a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium in 2009. Her doctoral work focused on structural studies of human small heat-shock proteins (sHSPs) in the lab of Sergey Strelkov. For postdoctoral training, she joined the lab of Han Remaut at VIB-VUB, working on two projects - the structural biology of bacterial S-layer proteins and structure determination of a bacterial glycosidase, a unique enzyme with the biotechnological use. After a career break, she launched a second post-doc in the laboratory of Philippe Kastner and Susan Chan (Department of Functional Genomics and Cancer) at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology, France, where she initiated structural studies of human transcription factor and tumor suppressor IKAROS. In 2021, Ekaterina joined the lab of Joris Messens as a postdoc to develop metabolitebiosensors for subcellular visualization using advanced computational, structure-based and high-throughput screening approaches.

Ekaterina Baranova

VUB | VIB | de Duve Institute