Eva Maria Novoa Pardo

Biography

Eva Maria is Group Leader at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research (Sydney, Australia), with a conjoint appointment with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology / Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT (Cambridge, USA) and the University of New South Wales. She is currently supervised by Prof John Mattick (Garvan Institute/UNSW), and co-supervised by Prof Manolis Kellis (MIT/Broad). During her PhD she performed both computational and experimental work, and her research was focused on the characterisation of the translation machinery across species and its applications to drug discovery, finding that a critical factor that explains the differences between codon usage bias across species is the emergence of two domain-specific tRNA modification enzymes (Novoa et al., Cell 2012). In addition, she also designed and screened antimalarials that specifically target the malaria parasite's translation machinery (Novoa et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci 2014), finding positive hits that kill the parasite in vivo, thus curing malaria in infected mice. Her current work is focused on understanding the diverse mechanisms of post-transcriptional regulation, with a special focus on deciphering the roles and interplay of RNA modifications, RNA structure and codon usage bias. For her postdoctoral studies, she has been awarded both an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship and an HFSP Postdoctoral Fellowship, which she currently holds. 

Research Interest

Post-transcriptional regulation RNA modifications ("epitranscriptomics") Specialised ribosomes Genomics and Next-Generation Sequencing Protein translation Computational molecular evolution In-silico and structure-based drug design Bioinformatics as a tool to understand biological questions