Dr Valeria Calvaresi

Dr Valeria Calvaresi

Wellcome Early Career Fellow & Postdoctoral Researcher

Valeria Calvaresi holds a degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from Sapienza, University of Rome (2014). After her degree, she won a national award for talented graduated students in STEM and moved to Institut Pasteur (Paris), working in bottom-up and top-down proteomics (2015-2016). In 2017, Valeria was recipient of a Marie-Curie International Training Network PhD fellowship held between the University of Copenhagen and GSK vaccines (Italy), when she specialized in structural mass spectrometry (MS) and developed hydrogen/deuterium-exchange (HDX) MS methods to study membrane proteins and vaccine antigens in native state.

After her PhD, Valeria was postdoctoral researcher at the department of Chemistry of King’s College London and successively at the University of Oxford (2021-2024 with prof. Weston Struwe), mainly focusing on characterizing the conformational changes and structural dynamics of virus fusion glycoproteins that underlie the virus entry mechanisms, immune response and virus evolution. Valeria worked on SARS-CoV-2 and Influenza (in collaboration with the Crick Institut), as well as Ebola viruses (in the Struwe lab). Valeria presented her works during several national and international conferences and is author of >15 peer-reviewed papers, trained a plethora of PhD students and scientists in industry and advanced the application of HDX-MS for studying challenging protein systems, such as membrane proteins in situ and virus glycoproteins.

Valeria has been very recently awarded with a Wellcome Trust Early-career fellowship, with her project focusing on understanding the immune response to the Ebola virus. Valeria’s approach involves creating an innovative biophysical platform where HDX-MS and mass photometry are applied on membrane surfaces replicating the authentic virus, with the aim of obtaining a realistic picture on how Ebola virus infects host cells and the human immune response, hence potentially designing better antibody therapeutics.