Elisabeth Villa
Elizabeth Villa, Ph.D., is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator and Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD). She earned her Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Fulbright Fellow and completed postdoctoral training as a Marie Curie Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich. Recruited to UC San Diego in 2014, Dr. Villa received an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award to develop cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) and related technological and computational advances for structural cell biology. She was named a Pew Scholar in 2017 and became an HHMI Investigator in 2021.
The Villa Lab develops and applies cutting-edge cryo-electron microscopy and tomography, cell biophysics, computational analysis, and integrative modeling to visualize macromolecular complexes in their native cellular environments. These approaches reveal molecular structures, interactions, and functions directly within cells. Current research focuses on: (1) the molecular architecture of bacterial cellular processes, including the novel compartments and cytoskeleton formed during jumbo phage infection; (2) the structure and organization of the nucleus and nuclear periphery; (3) the in situ structure and function of the Parkinson’s disease–associated protein LRRK2 in health and disease; and (4) biomolecular phase separation across diverse cellular systems, including bacteria, the nucleus, and the secretory pathway.