The UW–Madison Cryo-EM Research Center is continuing to build a staff that will serve as a resource for all of campus. Read about some of the new arrivals below.
Eric Montemayor, Facility Manager
Eric currently serves as the Operations and Technical Manager for the Cryo-EM Research Center at UW-Madison. Eric has a passion for structural enzymology and ribonucleoprotein structure. Upon joining the Department of Biochemistry in 2013, he helped Dave Brow and Sam Butcher use X-ray diffraction methods to determine the first high-resolution structures of the U6 small nuclear ribonucleoprotein (Montemayor et al, NSMB 2014; Montemayor et al, Nature Comm. 2018). Eric became a member of Elizabeth Wright’s research group in the summer of 2018, prior to joining the cryo-EM facility’s operations team in January of 2020.
Eric received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and subsequently performed his postdoctoral training at the University of Texas Health Science Center. He is an active member of the American Crystallographic Association and recently served on the US National Committee for Crystallography in the National Academies of Sciences (USNC/Cr). Eric was a participant in the inaugural Cold Spring Harbor course in Cryo-EM methods in March of 2018. In the Fall of 2019, he served as a 3-month embedded trainee at the NIH National Center for Cryo-EM Access and Training (NCCAT) at the New York Structural Biology Center.
Matt Larson, Associate Scientist
Matt joined the UW–Madison Department of Biochemistry in January 2020 as an Associate Scientist in the UW–Madison Cryo-EM Research Center. Matt received B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and earned his Ph.D. in Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in the lab of Champion Deivanayagam. His research applied X-ray crystallography to determining the first overall model of Streptococcus mutans Antigen I/II, a uniquely paired alpha-helical and polyproline type-II fibrillar structure. Following his Ph.D., he studied integral membrane protein structures as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Michigan. Matt’s research interests are in supporting and developing computational systems for the Cryo-EM Research Center. Matt has also worked as a software developer for desktop life science software and as a developer for VR/AR visualization technologies.
Juleen Dickson, Postdoctoral Research Associate
Juleen joined the UW–Madison Department of Biochemistry in August of 2019 as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the new Cryo-EM Research Center where she is using cryo-ET to investigate eukaryotic cell ultrastructure. She has a broad background in a wide range of scientific techniques. She received her B.S. in Marine Science from Long Island University and her M.S. in Biology at California State University, Fullerton. She earned her Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she used transmission electron microscopy techniques to investigate the ultrastructure of plant tissue. During this time, she gained experience with conventional TEM, SEM, and ultramicrotomy and assisted the director of the electron microscopy facility with user training, routine equipment maintenance, and the daily operations of the facility.
Bryan Sibert, Postdoctoral Research Associate
Bryan joined the UW-Madison Department of Biochemistry in January of 2019 as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Dr. Elizabeth Wright’s lab where is he using cryo-ET to study virus assembly in multiple systems including human respiratory syncytial virus. He received his B.S. in Biology at the University of South Carolina. He received his Ph.D in Cellular and Molecular Biology at UW-Madison in the lab of Dr. Paul Ahlquist, where he used a combination of molecular biology, light microscopy, and electron microscopy to study structures essential for viral RNA replication.