Cell scientist to watch – Dora Tang

Abstract

Dora Tang studied chemistry and then completed her PhD in membrane physics at Imperial College London, UK, under the supervision of John Seddon and Richard Templer. She then received Knowledge Transfer Secondment funding from Imperial College and worked for a year at Diamond Light Source, Oxfordshire, the UK's national synchrotron science facility. In 2011, Dora joined the lab of Stephen Mann at the University of Bristol, where she worked in the areas of the origin of life and bottom-up synthetic biology. Her research there included developing a hybrid protocell model based on the self-assembly of fatty acid membrane on coacervate microdroplets, as well as showing that coacervates support cell-free gene expression and building communication networks between two different populations of synthetic cells. In 2016, she started her own group at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, Germany, as part of the MaxSynBio consortium. Her research aims to understand the chemical and physical processes that drive molecular organisation in lipids, polymers and proteins in order to rationally control their self-assembly and understand how molecular ensembles make life.