Rate My Professor Michelle Peckham

As a Wellcome Trust Investigator, Professor Peckham's research centers on the regulation and function of motor proteins, particularly myosins and the cytoskeleton, employing advanced techniques such as super-resolution microscopy (PALM/STORM, iSIM, STED), Cryo-EM, and Affimer technology. Her laboratory investigates how mutations in cytoskeletal proteins lead to diseases including muscle disorders, cardiomyopathies, bleeding disorders, cancer, and sensory impairments. Notable achievements include determining the Cryo-EM structure of the shutdown state of smooth muscle myosin (Scarff et al., Nature, 2020), developing Affimers for super-resolution imaging of tubulin and other proteins (Tiede et al., eLife, 2017; Lopata et al., Scientific Reports, 2018), and elucidating effects of disease mutations in myosins using cultured human muscle cells (Parker et al., Journal of Molecular Biology, 2018). She has published extensively, with key works on Z-disk organization (Parker et al., Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine, 2023) and Affimer applications (Cordell et al., Journal of Cell Science, 2022). Professor Peckham has trained over 40 postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers and has held leadership roles such as President of the Royal Microscopical Society (2016-2019) and current Executive Honorary Secretary. She is a Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society and the Royal Society for Biology, and a member of the British Society for Molecular Biology.