Natalia Baranova obtained her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Ralf Richter at CIC biomaGUNE. She then joined the laboratory of Prof. Martin Loose at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, where her postdoctoral research was supported by two highly competitive long-term fellowships from EMBO and HFSP. As a senior postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Christoph Rademacher at the University of Vienna, she was awarded a Marie Jahoda Professorship Transition Grant to initiate her independent research career. The establishment of her own research group at CIC biomaGUNE has been further supported by the Ramón y Cajal and Ikerbasque Fellow grants.

Natalia’s research focuses on the reverse engineering of molecular assemblies to uncover the principles governing their function. Her current projects span three main areas: peptidoglycan synthesis, bacterial-host interactions, and the development of experimental approaches to reconstitute and study the dynamics of glycocalyx assembly.