Alyssa Miller is a PhD student in the Centre for Misfolding Diseases, University of Cambridge (UK). Her research focusses on the misfolding and aggregation of normally soluble peptides and proteins. This process is implicated in human diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. She uses AFM to characterise the morphology and mechanical properties of protein assembly states resulting from this complex aggregation process.
Recent work includes the development of a microfluidic spray sample deposition technique to overcome the challenges associated with fixing biological samples to surfaces. This maintains the ‘solution-like’ state of biomolecules, enabling the quantitative study of transient assembly states by AFM.
Alyssa Miller
Recent AFM paper:
Biography: Alyssa completed a MSci in Biochemistry from Queen Mary, University of London (UK), where she undertook research projects in protein-lipid interactions and electrophysiology (2015-2019). During this time, she also worked as a research assistant in psychology at the IWK Health Centre (Canada), where she helped develop internet-delivered behavioural treatments for depression (2012-2017). She is currently completing a PhD in biophysics at University of Cambridge (UK), under the supervision of Prof. Michele Vendruscolo and Prof. Tuomas Knowles. She is using AFM in combination with a suite of biophysical and biochemical techniques to understand protein aggregation and liquid-liquid phase separation at the nanoscale.
Twitter (Group): @VendruscoloLab, @KnowlesLabCamb
Websites: https://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/person/amm297
Are you a woman conducting AFM research or know of someone you would like to nominate to be featured in our next #WomenInAFM campaign? Contact us at community@nunano.com!
Also, check out our previous March and November 2021 Women in AFM blog posts to read about more researchers.
Why are we celebrating women in AFM? (March 2021)
Why do we need to highlight women in AFM? (Nov 2021)