My early scientific career began with the characterization of drug delivery in Low-Density Lipoprotein and mastering solution X-ray scattering (SAXS) techniques at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Graz, Austria. I have been bridging crystallography with solution scattering since 2000.Here I developed an ensemble modeling approach to investigate flexible and dynamic macromolecules by combining solution scattering, crystallography, and molecular dynamics. This early innovation becomes the groundwork for our current worldwide used FoXS software package.
Besides developing novel SAXS methods, my research focuses on visualizing the large megadalton biological assemblies that included the cellulosome, human complement, and non-homologous end-joining. Characterizing these dynamic molecules impacts medical research, like defining the allosteric mechanism for complement inhibition by the Staphylococcus aureus and discovering the extended grooved scaffold for DNA ligation in DNA break repair.