A/Prof Nadia Zatsepin develops serial crystallography technologies for atomic-resolution structural biology at physiological temperature. Her research encompasses instrumentation, computational method development and experiment design for serial crystallography at X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) and synchrotrons, with applications in protein structure determination, time-resolved reaction dynamics and drug development for antimicrobial resistance and neurodegenerative diseases.

She holds an ARC Future Fellowship and is based in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. She completed her BSc(Hons) and PhD at Monash University, followed by postdoctoral training and independent faculty positions at Arizona State University (2011-2019), where she led serial crystallography data analysis for the NSF BioXFEL Science and Technology Center. She was a Senior Research Fellow at La Trobe University (2019-2024) before joining Swinburne.

Her work has led to landmark publications capturing enzyme catalysis, ligand binding and light-driven protein dynamics at femtosecond-to-millisecond timescales, with implications for drug discovery targeting antimicrobial resistance and neurodegeneration, neglected tropical diseases and G protein-coupled receptor pharmacology. Her work has been cited in 33 patents. 

Her group develops open-source software tools for serial crystallography data processing as well as sample delivery system and data collection protocol development towards high-throughput serial crystallography. This work is establishing experimental capabilities in Australia that are currently only available internationally, supporting the broader structural biology community's access to room-temperature and time-resolved crystallography. Her ARC Discovery Project on "Synchrotron nanocrystallography" aims to extending serial crystallography to nanoscale samples, bridge the structure-solution gap between powder diffraction and microcrystallography, and enable time resolution in reactions initiated by chemical mixing, which are currently inaccessible.

Lab website: https://sites.google.com/view/zatsepinlab

Publication list: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=zYC2VMkAAAAJ