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Biography
Dr. Bartesaghi received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Universidad de la Republica, Montevideo, Uruguay in 1999 and 2001, respectively. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN in 2005.
He then joined the Biophysics Section of the Laboratory of Cell Biology at the NCI/NIH, Bethesda, MD as a post-doctoral fellow, and later became an Associate Scientist with the Center for Cancer Research. In 2018, he joined the Departments of Computer Science and Biochemistry at Duke University as an Associate Professor.
Dr. Bartesaghi is a pioneer in developing computational methods to solve structures of large macromolecular complexes by single particle cryo-EM, cryo-electron tomography and sub-volume averaging. He solved many influential structures including those of CRISPR/Cas9 complexes, GPCR/G-protein complexes, p97, and HIV-1/SARS glyco-proteins. He is also interested more broadly in machine learning, computer vision, image processing, and high-performance computing. Dr. Bartesaghi received the “Norman P. Salzman Memorial Award in Virology” from the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD for his work on the molecular architecture of native HIV-1 gp120 trimers.
He will support the overall mission of the Center for Structural Biology by establishing a state-of-the-art pipeline for high-resolution structural analysis of HIV-1 Env. He will provide access to cutting-edge techniques for structure determination and establish a strong technology development program that will ultimately contribute to advancing our mechanistic understanding of HIV-1 viral fusion.