PEOPLE

Olga went to Novosibirsk State University in Russia before obtaining her MSc from Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, working with Anthony Futerman on sphingolipid biochemistry. She received her PhD from the Johns Hopkins University, where she worked on protein folding with Ernesto Freire. Olga then trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Peter Kim at MIT and Eric Gouaux at Columbia University. There, she became interested in the structure and mechanism of membrane transporters. She started her lab at Weill Cornell Medical College in 2005.

Will received his BS degree in Biochemistry at State University of New York in Syracuse. He studied vesicle fusion in relation to the activity of SNARE proteins and SNARE regulatory proteins. He joined Boudker lab in 2018 as a lab manager/researcher.  

Xiaoyu earned her PhD from University of Miami. Currently in the Boudker lab she works on the transport mechanism of glutamate transporters using a combination of biophysical tools including cryo-EM and single molecule fluorescence imaging.

Yun received his PhD degree in chemical biology from Max Planck Institute in Germany and an initial postdoctoral training from University of Pennsylvania. He joined Boudker lab as a postdoctoral associate in 2015. His current research focuses on using NMR spectroscopy to understand the transport mechanism of glutamate transporters.

Biao received a BS degree in Bioengineering from Zhengzhou University, China in 2008. He earned his PhD degree at 2014 at the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he studied the structure and regulating mechanisms of Arf guanine exchange factor by X-ray crystallography. Then he carried out his postdoctoral study at Shanghai Tech University, where he solved the crystal structure of acetate channel. In 2017, he joined in the Boudker lab to study excitatory amino acid transporters.

Qianyi received her Bachelor of Science (Honours) degree in 2017 and her PhD in Medical Sciences (Pharmacology) in 2021 at the University of Sydney, Australia. She joined the Boudker Lab as a postdoctoral scientist in June 2021 and soon received a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Heart Association (2022-2023). Her work was recognised by the field, and she was awarded the 2024‐2026 class of the Charles H. Revson Senior Fellowship in the Biomedical Sciences Program. Her research explores the links between the structure, function, and conformational dynamics of glutamate transporters.

In 2012 and 2016, I obtained my Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Physical Chemistry from Sistan and Baluchestan University, Iran. Following my graduate studies, I joined the Molecular Bio-Computation & Drug Design Lab in the Health Science Department at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa as a postdoctoral researcher in May 2017. During this time, I investigated the inhibitory mechanism of covalent and non-covalent inhibitors against the epidermal growth factor receptor in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). After two years, I joined the Kuttele research group at the University of Cape Town in South Africa as a postdoctoral researcher in June 2019. My work there focused on molecular modeling of carbohydrates, while also continuing my research on NSCLC. In 2021, I joined the Truhlar research group in the Chemistry Department at the University of Minnesota, USA. There, my research centered on studying the energetics, mechanisms, and dynamics of atomic oxygen reactions. Currently, I am a member of the Boudker Lab, where I investigate the structure and conformational dynamics of membrane transporters using both experimental and computational methods.

Poonam earned her Ph.D. in structural biology from the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee, India, and completed her initial postdoctoral training at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. She joined the Boudker lab as a postdoctoral associate in April 2023. She is interested in exploring the structure and function of membrane transporters associated with human diseases.

Abdolkarim (Amin) received his PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of Sistan and Baluchestan, Iran. He then carried out his postdoc at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the University of Cape Town in South Africa from 2017-2022. He joined the Boudker lab in July 2023. He is interested in drug discovery and rational drug design in all therapeutic areas, synthesis of discovered and designed inhibitors, and their biological evaluation.

Rupasree Brahma earned her PhD in Life Sciences from the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, India, in September 2024. She joined the Boudker lab as a postdoctoral associate in February 2025. She is interested in exploring the structure, function, and conformational dynamics of glutamate transporters in membranes.

Vishnu earned his dual BS from SUNY: Stony Brook University in Mathematics and Physics. He then worked as a research technician/assistant at Rockefeller University for three years, exploring the world of fluorescence and microscopy. In 2019, he started his Ph.D. studies at Weill Cornell and joined the Boudker Lab in 2020. He is interested in uncovering transporter mechanisms through various probing techniques.

Yessenia got her BS from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Forensic Science, with a concentration in Toxicology and a minor in mathematics. She then did a two-year post-baccalaureate program at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She is currently a PhD student at Weill Cornell Medicine in the Physiology, Biophysics, and Systems Biology program. Her work focuses on the evolution of ion specificity in glutamate transporters.

Alex received his B.S. in Chemical Biology with a concentration in Computational Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 2021. After graduation, he worked for two years at Pfizer where he contributed to the development of RNA vaccine platforms. He joined the Boudker lab in 2024 where he hopes to learn more about membrane protein structure, transport, and dynamics.

Victor received his Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN), Nigeria. Then, he served as a research member of the UNN Ethnopharmacology Food and Drug Delivery research group, where he studied lipid vesicle formulation for drug delivery and the medicinal potentials of natural products using animal models. He also completed the Mini-PhD program at the ReachSci Society, United Kingdom, in collaboration with the University of Nigeria Nsukka, Nigeria. During his Mini-PhD program, he investigated the interference potential of antimalarial drugs on the accuracy of glucometers. In 2022, He was awarded the Erasmus Mundus Scholarship with which he obtained a Joint Master of Science degree in Sustainable Drug Discovery (S-DISCO) in 2024 from Ghent University, Belgium; Medical University of Gdansk, Poland, and the University of Lille, France. He also received a certificate following the completion of the Erasmus Blended Intensive Program on Drug Discovery 2030: A Roadmap for a New Decade from the Faculty of Science at the University of Porto, Portugal. During his master's thesis at the CNRS Integrative Structural Biology unit, France, he focused on the structural characterization of a coronavirus membrane protein. In 2025, Victor joined the Boudker Lab as a Staff Associate. His research focuses on the structural characterization and functional dynamics of human excitatory amino acid transporters.