Elizabeth Villa received her PhD in biophysics and computational biology as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was a European Union Marie Curie Post-doctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich, Germany. Her research is inspired by the ability of biology to operate on multiple scales, that is, how the behavior of molecules affects the behavior of tissues and organisms. The Villa Lab at the University of California San Diego develops methods that use electron microscopy (high magnification technique) and computational analysis to observe macromolecular complexes in their natural environment, the cell. This interdisciplinary research draws from areas of engineering, physics, chemistry, biology and computational sciences. Her recent area of focus is viewing the structure of the proteins that are responsible for Parkinson's disease inside cells at unprecedented resolution.