Silvia Onesti - Biography#

After a Master degree in Chemistry at the University of Pavia (as alumnus of Collegio Ghislieri), she moved to Imperial College London, to carry out a PhD in the Physics Department under the supervision of Prof. David Blow, one of the "founding fathers" of protein crystallography, and Dr Peter Brick. After a postdoc and a short position as a CNR Research Fellow in Pavia and as Maître de Conférence a l'École Politechnique (Palaiseau), in 1995 she returned to Imperial College London as a principal investigator. In 2009, she moved back to Italy to set up the Structural Biology laboratory at the Italian synchrotron facility Elettra, as Head of Structural Biology.

During the course of her career she has applied molecular and structural biology tools to study the basic genetic processes within the cell, such as DNA replication and repair, translation and transcription. She uses protein crystallography to determine the atomic structure of proteins involved in these processes, as well as biochemical, biophysical and cellular approaches to understand how they work. Very early on she has also championed the use of electron microscopy to visualize the architecture of large complexes and/or small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) to obtain additional structural information. She has contributed to the field of amynoacyl-tRNA synthetases, which play a crucial role in the fidelity of translation of the genetic code, by determining the structures of various lysyl-tRNA synthetases. She has determined the crystal structure of various subunits of RNA polymerases. She has then focussed on DNA helicases and their interacting partners, using a combination of electron microscopy and crystallography.

She has been supervising, training and mentoring a number of Master students, PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom had a successful career in science, and are now group leaders in academia or industry, in various European and non-European countries.

In addition to active research, SO has a strong interest in the teaching of science, and in particular biophysics and structural biology, in emerging countries. In collaboration with the International Centre for Theoretical Physics and the International Union of Crystallography, she has organised a series of advanced courses/workshops on structural biology, biophysics and nanotechnologies for the life sciences in Trieste, South Africa, India, Senegal, Tanzania, Rwanda, and has given lecture courses in Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Benin and Iran. She has been the liason officer between Elettra and the Structural Biology community in India. She has written a number of articles for the dissemination of Science, and participated to many outreach events.