EMBO Gold Medal awarded to Paola Picotti
The EMBO Gold Medal is awarded annually to young researchers in Europe for their outstanding achievements in the field of life sciences. One of the two winners in 2019 is Paola Picotti, Professor at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology at ETH Zurich.
Paola Picotti was an Assistant Professor (SNFS Professorship of the Swiss National Science Foundation) for the Biology of Protein Networks from 2011 and was appointed Associate Professor of Molecular Systems Biology at the Department of Biology of ETH Zurich in October 2017.
After studying pharmaceutical chemistry and technology at the University of Padua (I), she received her doctorate in molecular mechanisms of protein misfolding at the CRIBI Biotechnology Center of this university in 2006.
After a short research stay at the MATI Excellence Center of the University of Udine in 2007, she worked as a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow in the research group of Professor Rudolf Aebersold at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology at ETH Zurich. She developed a quantitative method of targeted proteomic analysis that allows to study the behavior of cellular protein networks under different conditions.
Paola Picotti's research group is investigating how protein conformational changes influence cell physiology and lead to human diseases. The group is engaged in the development of mass spectrometric-based structural and chemical-proteomic methods for monitoring protein conformational changes in complex cellular environments. These tools are combined with classical biochemical, cell biological and genetic approaches.