Group Leader

I graduated from Lobachevsky State University, Russia, in 2012 with a degree in theoretical physics, specialising in nonlinear dynamics and computational neuroscience. I later obtained my PhD in molecular neurobiology at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, in 2016, under the supervision of Prof. Roland Brandt and Prof. Wolfgang Junge. My research focused on the regulation of the neuronal cytoskeleton by the microtubule-associated protein Tau and its role in Alzheimer’s disease.

From 2016 to 2017, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Prof. Helmut Grubmüller at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, Germany. In 2017, I was awarded an individual research grant by the German Research Foundation and promoted to a project leader in the Department of Theoretical and Computational Biophysics. Between 2017 and 2024, my research investigated the nanoscale mechanics of microtubule self-assembly using large-scale computer simulations, as well as developing automated structure refinement methods for cryo-electron microscopy. In 2023, I was elected as an associate member of the International Max Planck Research School for Physics of Biological and Complex Systems (IMPRS-PBCS) and appointed as a thesis supervisor in the Research Training Group “Cytoskeleton elements of active matter – from molecular interactions to cellular biophysics” (CYTAC) at the University of Göttingen.

In October 2024, I joined the Division of Computational Biology in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee to establish my own research group aiming to uncover the biomechanics of chromosome segregation during mitosis driven by microtubule-based forces.

Funding and awards