Sam Gérard

sam

Sam joined us in 2018 as a D. Phil. student supported by the Wellcome Trust programme in Cellular Structural Biology. He was mainly interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms of action of different human pathogens using cryo-electron microscopy. The first major paper from his D. Phil. was recently published, revealing his determination of the first stucture of the inhibited state of the Sec translocon.

Before he joined the lab, Sam obtained his Engineer’s Degree in Chemistry at the École Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Montpellier. Sam took academic internships at the Academia Sinica (Taipei, Taiwan), the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research (Utrecht, the Netherlands), RIKEN-IMS (Yokohama, Japan) and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (Melbourne, Australia), where he developed various skills in Organic Chemistry, Membrane Biochemistry, Immunogenetics and Glycobiology. He then discovered the field of Structural Biology in our lab during his Part II placement funded by the Erasmus+ programme. Before he enrolled for his DPhil programme, Sam worked on the Structural Biology of microtubule-associated proteins at the Paul Scherrer Institute (Villigen, PSI). 

Sam won the 2021 Eric Newsholme Prize for Biochemistry from Merton College, Oxford.

Sam is now a post-doctoral researcher at EMBL Heidelberg, working with Alba Diz-Munoz and Julia Mahamid.

 

Rawlinson, T.A., Barber, N.M., Mohring, F., Cho, J.S., Kosaisavee, V., Gérard, S.F., Alanine, D.G.W., Labbé, G.M., Elias. S.C., Silk, S.E., Quinkert, D., Jin, J., Marshall, J.M., Payne, R.O., Minassian, A.M., Russell, B., Rénia, K., Nosten. F.H., Moon, R.W., Higgins, M.K.* and Draper, S.J.* (2019) Structural basis for inhibition of Plasmodium vivax invasion by a broadly neutralising vaccine-induced human antibody. Nature Microbiology 4 1497-1507

Gérard, S.F., Hall, B.S., Zaki, A.M., Corfield, K.A., Mayerhofer, P.U., Costa, C., Whelligan, D.K., Biggin, P.C., Simmonds, R.E.* and Higgins, M.K.* (2020) Structure of the inhibited state of the Sec translocon. Molecular Cell 79 406-415

Ni, T., Gérard, S.F., Zhao, G., Dent, K., Ning, J., Zhou, J., Shi, S., Anderson-Daniels, J., Li, W., Jang, S., Engelman, A.N., Aiken, C. and Zhang, P. (2020) Intrinsic curvature of the HIV-1 CA hexamer underlies capsid topology and interaction with cyclophilin A. Nature Structural and Molecular Biology 27 855-862