Alberto Bartesaghi, PhD

Dr. Bartesaghi has over 20 years of experience developing methods for protein structure determination using single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET). His interdisciplinary expertise spans image analysis, machine learning, and structural biology, with a research focus on improving structure determination workflows and expanding the applicability of cryo-EM and cryo-ET to biomedically relevant targets. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications across the life sciences, engineering, and machine learning, contributing to the determination of over 250 structures deposited in the Electron Microscopy Data Bank and Protein Data Bank, including viral proteins, membrane transporters, GPCRs, CRISPR-Cas complexes, and α-synuclein fibrils implicated in Parkinson’s disease and multiple system atrophy. His group has developed widely used open-source platforms for high-throughput cryo-EM/ET data collection and analysis. In this project, Dr. Bartesaghi will apply high-throughput structural approaches to decode α-synuclein conformational diversity and support predictive seed amplification assays.