Associated Professorships
Prof. Dr. Maya Topf
Maya Topf is a W3 Professor jointly appointed by the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) and the Leibniz Institute of Virology (LIV). Since October 2020, she has led the research group “Integrative Virology” at the Centre for Structural Systems Biology (CSSB) on the DESY campus in Bahrenfeld. She holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on developing integrative modelling methods that combine data from techniques such as cryo-electron microscopy (cryoEM) and structural mass spectrometry (MS) with computational approaches to study the architecture of large macromolecular complexes, particularly viruses. Her team also analyzes protein–protein interaction networks, employs AI-driven predictions to generate and refine structural models, and designs targeted experiments to validate these predictions. A key focus is on resolving viral–host interaction interfaces critical for infection mechanisms, using hybrid structural data to overcome the resolution limitations of individual techniques. Prior to her current role, she was Professor of Structural and Computational Biology at the Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology at Birkbeck/UCL, University of London, where she began as a Career Development Fellow of the Medical Research Council in 2006. Earlier in her career, she held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, San Francisco, and the Australian National University. Her team is actively involved in international community challenges and initiatives such as CASP (Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction), where she is one of the organizers, and CCP-EM (Collaborative Computational Project for Electron Microscopy), for which she serves as Chair. Since 2024, she has also served as Deputy Research Director at the Leibniz Institute of Virology and co-speaker of the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre on Emerging Viral Infections ( CRC1648 ).
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