Sony Malhotra

Sony holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology followed by the PhD (2009-2014) in Life Sciences from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (Bangalore, India), where she worked on the classification and assessment of protein-nucleic acids and protein-protein complexes. She then briefly joined the CCP-EM, STFC (Feb 2015-Aug 2015) before joining Prof. Sir Tom L. Blundell’s laboratory, University of Cambridge, for her first postdoc (2015-2018)​. At Cambridge, she was investigating the effects of antimicrobial drug resistance on protein structure and function in collaboration with the Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge and one of the tuberculosis national reference laboratories in India (NIRT, Chennai). She then did her second postdoc at Birkbeck College, London (2018-2020) with Prof Maya Topf, where she developed a machine learning based metric for assessing the quality of protein-protein complexes derived using cryoEM. She rejoined STFC in Dec 2020 as a Senior Data Scientist and is working on a project between CCP-EM, STFC SCD Scientific Machine learning group and eBIC (electron bioimaging centre). She is interested in the application of machine learning approaches for interpretation of cryoEM data, genomics and impacts of gene mutations. She is also a very busy mum of two!