
Education
Biography
Dr Kate Michie is Senior Lecturer in BABS and runs the Structural Biology Facility in MWAC. She is a molecular biologist/biochemist with special interests in structural biology. Kate completed her doctoral degree at the University of Sydney under the supervision of Dr Liz Harry and Professor Gerry Wake, working in the field of bacterial cell division. (For work completed during this time see JBact and Mol Micro).
In 2005 she received a L'Oréal-UNESCO Fellowship and spent the next five years working with Jan Löwe at the MRC LMB in Cambridge, UK. She carried out research into the structure and function of Structural Maintenance of Chromosome (SMC) complexes and how they exert molecular control over the topological and spatial organization of chromosomes (see EMBO J). In 2006 she received a Marie Curie Incoming Postdoctoral Fellowship and continued working on SMC proteins and within the bacterial cell division field. During this time in Cambridge she published a number first author papers (including Ann. Rev. Biochem, Mol. Cell, and PloS one) and contributed significantly to work published in PNAS and Nature .
She returned to science in Australia in 2012, working with Professor Jill Trewhella and Professor Mitchell Guss at the University of Sydney. In this role she worked on Myosin Binding protein C (see Structure and Structure).
In 2015 Kate joined UNSW as a Senior Research Associate working with Professor Paul Curmi working on light harvesting proteins (see Nature Communications) and the Ezrin family of proteins ( see IJMS and Biophys. Rev.)
In 2019 Kate established the Structural Biology Facility (SBF) with MWAC at UNSW (https://www.analytical.unsw.edu.au/facilities/sbf).
Professional Experience
Adjunct Lecturer (BABS) (2021-)
Senior Research Associate, MWAC UNSW. (2019-)
Senior Research Associate, School of Physics, UNSW. (2015-2019)
Senior Postdoctoral Scientist, School of Molecular Biosciences, The University of Sydney (2012-2015)
MRC Investigator Scientist, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK.(2008-2010)
Marie Curie International Fellow, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK. Funded by 6th European Commission Framework (2006-2008)
UNESCO L'OREAL International Fellow for Young Women in Life Sciences MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge. Supervisor–Dr Jan Löwe. Funded by UNESCO and L’Oreal. (2005)
Postdoctoral Scientist, School of Molecular and Microbial Biosciences, The University of Sydney, Australia. Supervisor–Dr Liz Harry and Professor Gerry Wake. (2004)
Professional Activities
International
ASIAN OFFICE OF AEROSPACE R&D 21IOA019. Awarded Sep 2021 for funding 2021-2023.
MEDICAL RESEARCH FUTURE FUND (MRFF) APP2016906. Awarded April 2022.
2007 Named ‘Rising Talent’ and short-listed for Women’s Forum 3rd Ed, Deauville, France.
2006 Marie Curie International Fellowship Funded by 6th European Commission Framework
2005 UNESCO L'Oreal International Fellowship for Women in Science 7th edition of the L’ORÉAL-UNESCO FOR WOMEN IN SCIENCE (Life sciences), Funded by UNESCO and L’Oreal.
We want to understand how biology uses proteins to control the shape of membranes. In particular we focus on the proteins essential to the processes of cell division and building cell surface structures such as villi and vesicles. The proteins involved in these processes interact with themselves and with the membrane to bend and shape it, and to tether other proteins to it. The types of proteins involved arise in all the domains of life— archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes, and, maybe not surprisingly, are often carried out by related proteins.
We focus on understanding structurally the proteins that carry out these tasks. We use X-ray crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy and a range of protein and biophysical experiments to probe our targets.
CURRENT RESEARCH ACTIVITIES
Dynamin-like Proteins in Bacteria
Tubulin-like proteins in Bacteria and Archaea (collaboration with Dr Brendan Burns)
Ezrin/Moesin and Merlin and the membrane in humans (Jointly supervised with Prof Curmi)
Understanding mutations in clinical setting (collaboration with Dr Emily Oates)
Alphafold2- implementation and it's roles in integrative structural biology
My Research Supervision
PhDs in Physics
PhDs in BABS
Honours in BABS
My Teaching
Currently teaching into: