Rate My Professor Doryen Bubeck

Doryen Bubeck is Professor of Structural Immunology in the Department of Life Sciences, Faculty of Natural Sciences, at Imperial College London. She serves as Director of the Centre for Structural Biology since 2021 and as a satellite Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute. Bubeck obtained her BS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and her PhD in biophysics from Harvard University in 2005, with a thesis on biochemical and structural studies exploring the mechanism of poliovirus cell entry using cryoelectron microscopy. She held an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford under Yvonne Jones and was a Junior Research Fellow at St John's College, Oxford. In 2012, she joined Imperial College London as a Lecturer in Structural Biology, supported by a Cancer Research UK Career Establishment Award to establish her independent research group, and was promoted to Professor in 2023.

Her research focuses on host-pathogen interactions, employing model membrane systems, biophysics, and structural biology to investigate fundamental mechanisms in immunity, including how pathogens hijack cellular pathways during infection. A key area is the complement membrane attack complex (MAC), an immune pore that kills bacteria; her laboratory solved the first MAC structure on lipid membranes, identified molecular drivers of its sequential assembly, and demonstrated how immune activation alters membrane biophysical properties to enable protein translocation across lipid bilayers. She has explored MAC inhibition on human cells to prevent disease and structures of pathogen inhibitors. Utilizing cryo-electron microscopy, her findings inform antibiotic design and therapeutics for inflammatory conditions. Bubeck received the GlaxoSmithKline Award from the Biochemical Society in 2026 for advances in medical science and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. Notable publications include 'Structural basis for membrane attack complex inhibition by CD59' (Nature Communications, 2023), 'Capturing pore-forming intermediates of MACPF and cholesterol-dependent cytolysins' (Cell Reports, 2022), and 'Structural basis of soluble membrane attack complex formation' (Nature Communications, 2021). She has been funded by Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust, and EMBO, and delivers lectures such as 'Big questions, tiny machines'.