Elizabeth Villa

Elizabeth Villa is an American biophysicist who is Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego. Her research considers the development of Cryo Electron Tomography and structural biology. She was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Investigator in 2021.

Early life and education
Villa grew up in Mexico, which is where she first studied physics. She earned her doctorate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she worked as a Fulbright Fellow. She completed her research in the laboratory of Klaus Schulten on the modeling of biomolecular complexes. During her doctorate, she was introduced to cryogenic electron microscopy, and worked with Joachim Frank on approaches to combine X-ray crystallography with Cryo EM and molecular dynamics. She moved to the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions as a postdoctoral fellow.

Research and career
Villa joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, San Diego in 2014. She was selected a Pew Research Scholar in 2017. In 2021, Villa was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellow.

Villa has developed novel techniques to explore cellular machinery. This machinery includes bulky molecular complexes, which are composed of nucleic acids, carbohydrates and proteins. Her early work developed tags for Cryo Electron Tomography (cryo-ET), for which she was awarded an National Institutes of Health Director's Award. She developed cryo focused ion beam milling, which makes use of an ion beam to remove ultra-thin layers of cellular material. Images can be acquired from various angles using a transmission electron microscope and reconstructed to form a three-dimensional picture.

Villa determined the structure of the LRRK2 protein. Mutations in LRRK2 are the most frequent cause of Parkinson's disease. The protein includes a 14 Å structure with a pathogenic mutation that forms a right-handed double helix around left-handed tubules. By understanding the 3D structure of LRRK2, Villa hopes to design new treatments for Parkinson's disease.