ACA SIG Officer Candidate 2021: Suzette Pabit

I am a research associate in the laboratory of Prof. Lois Pollack at Cornell University where we develop experimental tools to apply Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS) and Wide Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS) experiments to study protein and nucleic acid conformations and protein-nucleic acid interactions. In the Pollack Lab, I have been involved in several developmental projects including Anomalous SAXS (ASAXS) to look at ion atmospheres of nucleic acids [JACS 2010, 132, 16334], time-resolved SAXS (TR-SAXS) for RNA folding [RNA 2018, 24, 1828], initial applications of WAXS to probe DNA and RNA conformations [JChemPhys 2016, 114, 205102], and contrast variation SAXS (CV-SAXS) to study protein-nucleic acid interactions [BiophysJ 2020, 199, 2524; PNAS 2017, 114, 334]. I received my Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Florida while working on the protein folding problem. I am excited to meet and interact with a community of people interested in expanding the use of SAS tools, both experimental method development and computational approaches, to solve molecular biophysics problems. 2022 will be my first ACA meeting and I am happy to serve if needed.