Dr Kate Michie

Biography

Dr Kate Michie is Chief Scientist of the  Structural Biology Facility (MWAC) and a Senior lecturer in BABS. She is a molecular biologist/biochemist with special interests in structural biology. She currently leads a specialist compute team supporting AI/Deep Learning methods for UNSW researchers in structural biology. 

Kate completed her doctoral degree at the University of Sydney under the supervision of Dr Liz Harry and Professor Gerry Wake, working in the field of bacterial cell division. (For work completed during this time see JBact and Mol Micro).

In 2005 she received a L'Oréal-UNESCO Fellowship and spent the next five years working with Jan Löwe at the MRC LMB in Cambridge, UK. She carried out research into the structure and function of Structural Maintenance of Chromosome (SMC) complexes and how they exert molecular control over the topological and spatial organization of chromosomes (see EMBO J). In 2006 she received a Marie Curie Incoming Postdoctoral Fellowship and continued working on SMC proteins and within the bacterial cell division field. During this time in Cambridge she published a number first author papers (including Ann. Rev. Biochem, Mol. Cell, and PloS one) and contributed significantly to work published in PNAS and Nature .

She returned to science in Australia in 2012, working with Professor Jill Trewhella and Professor Mitchell Guss at the University of Sydney. In this role she worked on Myosin Binding protein C (see Structure and Structure).

In 2015 Kate joined UNSW as a Senior Research Associate working with Professor Paul Curmi working on light harvesting proteins (see Nature Communications) and the Ezrin family of proteins ( see IJMS and Biophys. Rev.)

In 2019 Kate established the Structural Biology Facility (SBF) with MWAC at UNSW (https://www.analytical.unsw.edu.au/facilities/sbf).

Professional Experience

Senior Lecturer 2022

Adjunct Lecturer (BABS) (2021-)

Chief Scientist SBF, MWAC UNSW. (2019-)

Senior Research Associate, School of Physics, UNSW. (2015-2019)

Senior Postdoctoral Scientist, School of Molecular Biosciences, The University of Sydney (2012-2015)

MRC Investigator Scientist, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK.(2008-2010)

Marie Curie International Fellow, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK. Funded by 6th European Commission Framework (2006-2008)

UNESCO L'OREAL International Fellow for Young Women in Life Sciences MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge. Supervisor–Dr Jan Löwe. Funded by UNESCO and L’Oreal. (2005)

Postdoctoral Scientist, School of Molecular and Microbial Biosciences, The University of Sydney, Australia. Supervisor–Dr Liz Harry and Professor Gerry Wake. (2004)

Professional Activities

• Chairman of the Sydney Protein Group (Nov 2021-2024)
• Greater Sydney CAP Leader for Synchrotron beam time at the Australian Synchrotron (Sept 2021- current).
• Set-up and runs UNSW Structural Biology Facility. This includes a number of biophysical analysis instruments, a number of robotic liquid handlers and an X-ray diffractometer since 2019
• NSW Cryo EM Users Group Meeting co-organiser  and Chair (with Dr Nick Ariotti)  G37, F10 Chemical Sciences Building, UNSW,     Thursday 28th February 2019.
• Interactive Science Expo Session presenter, UNSW, November 28th 2019, Wallace Wurth Building 
• Structural Biology Session organizer and presenter, Sensory Scientific Exhibition & Discovery Day, UNSW, December 11th 2018, Wallace Wurth Building
• Invited Chair for Integrative Structural Biology Symposium, Combio 2018, Sydney
• Organizational Committee member, Australian Society of Biophysics Meeting, UTS.
• Organiser and chair of Cryo EM Australian Society of Biophysics Workshop, UTS, 2017
• NSW ASBMB State Representative (Australian Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) (2015-2017)