ACA SIG Officer Candidate 2021: Yifan Cheng

It is my great honor to be nominated for the ACA Cryo-EM SIG chair. I am a Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF and Investigator of Howard Hughes Medical Institute. My long-term research interest has been in methodology of cryo-EM and application of cryo-EM to address challenging biological questions. I was trained as an electron microscopist, have been working in the field of cryo-EM since 1996, first on electron crystallography, then focused on single particle cryo-EM. I co-chaired 2014 Kuo cryo-EM symposium, co-started the CryoEM subgroup of Biophysics Society in 2015 and chaired 3DEM Gordon Research Conference in 2016. If elected, I would promote communications and collaborations between crystallographers and microscopists, to further advance the technology and applications of these structural biology tools and to address new challenging structural biology questions in the era of accurate AI structure predictions. I would also promote application of cryo-EM in drug discovery and development, as well as promote equity, diversity and inclusion.