Meeting Committee

Election Home | Ballot SIGs

Sarah EJ Bowman, PhD

Associate Investigator; Director of the National High-Throughput Crystallization Center, Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute

Education:
• Bachelor’s English Literature & Women’s Studies (Cornell College 1996)
• BS Chemistry (Metropolitan State College of Denver 2005)
• PhD Chemistry (University of Rochester 2010)
• Postdoctoral Fellow (Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2010-2016)
• Postdoctoral Fellow (Los Alamos National Laboratory 2016-2017)

Professional Activities: 2017-2022 Assistant Investigator HWI; 2017-present Director National High High-Throughput Crystallization (HTX) Center HWI; 2018-present Organizer, Metals in Structural Biology Workshop, SSRL/LCLS Users Meeting; 2019-present Participant, New Technologies Working Group (IMCA-CAT, Sector 17, APS); 2020-2022 Reviewer, NIH & NSF Panels; 2021 Vice-Chair, ACA BioMac SIG; 2021 Session Chair, Getting the First Crystal (ACA BioMac SIG); 2021 Session Chair, Structural Biology against Coronavirus, IUCr Congress; 2022 Organizer, ACA SciArt Show; 2022 Chair, ACA BioMac SIG; 2022-present Associate Investigator HWI; 2022-present Member, SSRL Users Executive Committee; 2023 Session Chair, Microcrystal Electron Diffraction (ACA CryoEM SIG); 2023 Organizer, ACA Workshop on Sample Attributes for Multiple-techniques and Principal Requirements for Experiments in Pan-structural biology (SAMPREP); 2023 Power Hour Organizer, Metals in Biology Gordon Research Conference; 2023-2027 Standing Member, NIH MSFB Study Section; 2023 Nerdy Jobs Pilot Episode on Protein Crystallography with Dr. Raven the Science Maven

Research Interests: My research laboratory is working to develop new techniques to crystallize biological macromolecules and to detect and handle small biomolecular crystals. We are building pipelines for cutting edge structural approaches, from serial synchrotron, XFEL, and microcrystal electron diffraction experiments to synchrotron-based temperature- and humidity-controlled X-ray diffraction experiments. We also work to combine crystallographic and spectroscopic approaches for metalloproteins, with a focus on proteins involved in metal homeostasis in bacterial pathogens and in neurological diseases. As the Director of the National HTX Center, I am fortunate to be associated with an enormous spectrum of structural studies and to be engaged with crystallographers and structural scientists from academia, industry, and government laboratories.

Statement: I am grateful that the ACA Nominating Committee has asked me to stand as a candidate to become a member of the Meeting Committee. When I attended my first ACA meeting in Toronto (2018), I felt like I had found my professional home. In large part because of my experiences at ACA meetings, I have continued to become more and more involved in the organization. My personal experience at ACA meetings underscores how important the annual meeting is to the membership – they are engaging, interactive events in the structural sciences community. My participation in the annual ACA meetings has included serving as a session chair (2021, 2023), as a workshop organizer (2023), as the BioMac SIG Vice-Chair and Chair (2021, 2022), as an organizer of the SciArt Show (2022), and as a speaker. The ACA is a unique professional organization in that it serves the entire structural sciences community. The enormous strengths of the ACA include 1) the incredible diversity of topics, from materials science and biological molecules to light source operations, 2) the size of the target molecules being studied, from small molecules to massive macromolecular machinery, and 3) the broad spectrum of techniques that we use as structural scientists. At the core of the work we all do as members of ACA is the focus on using structural science to probe fundamental questions in each of our fields. The Annual Meeting is an opportunity to bring people working in structural sciences together and to foster interdisciplinary conversations and interactions. I would be honored to be involved in the planning and organizing for the Annual Meeting over the next few years.