Biology Seminar Series: Cristina Paulino, "Think like a channel, act like a carrier - The case of SLC9C1, a voltage-gated sperm-specific Na+/H+ exchanger"

Cristina Paulino is a first-generation academic from Portugal, who did her undergraduate in Biochemistry at the Heinrich-Heine University, Germany. She obtained her PhD at the the Max-Planck Institute (MPI) of Biophysics, Germany, in 2014. Here, she became proficient in cryo-electron microscopy under the supervision of Werner Kühlbrandt and her interest in membrane protein biochemistry was sparked. Shortly after a successful postdoc in the group of Raimund Dutzler at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, she was appointed as an Assistant Professor and head of the cryo-EM unit in 2017 at the Groningen Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute (GBB), The Netherlands. In 2023, Cristina became a full professor at the Biochemistry Centre (BZH) of the Heidelberg University, Germany. Her research is focused on elucidating the mechanism of action of membrane transporters and channels on a molecular level. It is driven by fundamental questions about how these essential proteins work and are regulated; how structure relates to function; how malfunction causes diseases; and, if applicable, explore their pharmacological potential.