Jingjin Fan awarded Wellcome Early-Career Award

Oxford Chemistry researcher Dr Jingjin Fan has been awarded a prestigious five-year Wellcome Early-Career Award to support her research into membrane protein dynamics and regulation.

Dr Fan’s research focuses on understanding how membrane proteins are regulated by their molecular environment. These proteins are highly dynamic and can adopt multiple conformational states, some of which are difficult to capture using conventional structural biology approaches.

Her Wellcome-funded project will develop new ways to integrate native mass spectrometry with cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), using electrospray ion beam deposition (ESIBD)-based soft-landing approaches to help bridge the two techniques.

By combining their complementary capabilities, the research aims to provide new insights into membrane protein dynamics and regulation and to expand the range of protein states that can be investigated structurally.

Ultimately, this work seeks to establish new approaches for studying the molecular mechanisms that govern membrane protein function, with potential applications across structural biology and biomedical research.

Dr Fan said:

This award comes at a really important point in my career, as it gives me the opportunity to build on the technologies I have developed over the past several years and establish my own independent research programme. What excites me most is the possibility of bridging native mass spectrometry and cryo-EM in new ways, and using that connection to uncover dynamic aspects of membrane protein function that we currently struggle to see.