UF appoints new director of Center for Structural Biology

August 6, 2007

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The University of Florida College of Medicine has named Mavis Agbandje-McKenna, an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, the new director of the Center for Structural Biology.

Agbandje-McKenna will continue the work of Thomas Mareci, who served as the center’s director from 1993 to 2007. Mareci left the position earlier this year to initiate a new UF graduate program in biophysics.

The Center for Structural Biology is located in the McKnight Brain Institute and has as its mission the study of the structure of biological molecules that combine to create organisms. It supports the research of six principal investigators, five of whom are faculty members in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology and one of whom is in the department of neuroscience. In her new leadership role, Agbandje-McKenna will seek to expand the center’s membership and establish it as a hub for UF research on the architecture of life-forming molecules.

“I would like to see everyone who’s interested in structural biology at UF become a member of the center, as a way of encouraging collaboration for grants and so on,” Agbandje-McKenna said. “Right now, everybody’s distributed around the UF campus. We need to gather information on the techniques and instruments out there for obtaining structural information, so that the members are aware of it and we can say, ‘This person has expertise in a certain area – can this be useful for me?’”

Agbandje-McKenna earned her doctoral degree in biophysics from the University of London. After completing a postdoctoral appointment at Purdue University, she returned to England and worked as a research fellow at the University of Warwick. Agbandje-McKenna has been a member of the UF College of Medicine faculty since 1999.