Welcoming Alejandro Buschiazzo, Dorothee Liebschner and Stephen Muench as Co-editors of Acta Crystallographica F – Structural Biology Communications

In this editorial, we would like to welcome and introduce three Co-editors to Acta Crystallographica F – Structural Biology Communications (Fig. 1). The three newcomers are Dr Alejandro Buschiazzo, a microbiologist and structural biologist; Dr Dorothee Liebschner, a computational structural biologist; and Professor Stephen Muench, who specializes in cryo-electron microscopy of membrane proteins.

Figure 1 Our new Co-editors: Alejandro Buschiazzo, Dorothee Liebschner and Stephen Muench.

Dr Alejandro Buschiazzo is Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology of the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France. He also holds an appointment as Head of the Laboratory of Molecular and Structural Microbiology at the Institut Pasteur de Montevideo, Uruguay. Alejandro is a Biology graduate (majoring in Zoology) of the Universidad de la Plata in Argentina and completed his PhD at the Institute Leloir in Buenos Aires. He performed postdoctoral research at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, specializing in protein crystallography within the Department of Structural Biology and Chemistry. Since 2003, he has been a tenured research scientist there. His scientific pursuits focus on microbiology, with a particular emphasis on understanding the mol­ecular mechanisms of key proteins, bacterial signalling and regulation (Imelio et al., 2021). He is a member of The World Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences of Uruguay. His appointment to the Editorial Board will strengthen our expertise in experimental structural microbiology and hopefully attract more manuscripts from the South American structural biology community.

Dr Dorothee Liebschner is a Research Scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the San Francisco Bay area of California, USA. Dorothee studied physics at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany and obtained her doctoral degree at the Université Henri Poincaré in Nancy, France (now Université de Lorraine). After that she was a postdoc at Argonne National Laboratory in the USA and at the Photon Factory in Japan. She joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2015 working on developing methods for the Phenix software suite (https://phenix-online.org; Liebschner et al., 2019). She has extensive expertise in creating methods for refinement and model building in structural biology, native SAD phasing and very high-resolution crystallographic refinement. The recent focus widening of Acta Cryst. F – Structural Biology Communications into publishing short methods and bioinformatics papers makes her appointment to the Editorial Board especially welcome.

Professor Stephen Muench is Professor of Structural Biology of Membrane Proteins at the School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Leeds, UK. He is also Deputy Director of the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology, which houses one of the largest and most experienced groups working in the area of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). Stephen studied Biochemistry and Microbiology at the University of Sheffield and gained his PhD at the Krebs Institute for Biomolecular Research. After postdoc positions at the Universities of Sheffield and Leeds, in 2015 he was appointed Lecturer at the School of Biomedical Sciences of University of Leeds, promoted to Associate Professor in 2019 and to Professor earlier this year. Stephen is an expert in cryo-EM methods and applications (Hirst et al., 2024) and his expertise in this important area is a welcome addition to the Editorial Board. He applies the technique to membrane proteins, an important and still under-represented category in structural biology. Stephen also has strong teaching and mentoring experience, which will help us in working with early career researchers.

We welcome Alejandro, Dorothee and Stephen to the Editorial Board of Acta Crystallographica F – Structural Biology Communications and look forward to working with them in growing the journal, maintaining its high technical and scientific standards and exploring new directions (Nonato, 2023).