Silvia Ravera

Dr. Ravera received her M.Sc. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of Turin, Italy, and her Ph.D. in Physiology from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. During this time, she learned a great deal about the structure and function of membrane proteins to investigate the mechanism, localization, and regulation of phosphate transporters in the kidney. During her post-doctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Gary Rudnick in the Department of Pharmacology at Yale, she gained experience with bacterial transporters and developed skills in the purification and reconstitution of membrane proteins such as LeuT. In 2012, she became a member of the laboratory of Dr. Nancy Carrasco in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale to work on the Na+/I- symporter (NIS), a protein of significant physiological and medical relevance. She studied the optimization of a viral vector for gene therapy using NIS as a reporter gene. She characterized NIS's binding, expression, and purification for structural studies and ultimately determined the 3D structure by cryo-EM.