Susan M. Lea is the Chief of the Center for Structural Biology at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland, USA. She received her undergraduate degree in Physiology from Oxford University and her DPhil from the Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics in Oxford. After a year and half as a postdoc there she established her independent group in the same department with a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship. Over the next 25 years she held a variety of different academic posts in Oxford ending as the Professor of Microbiology in the Sir William Dunn School. At the end of 2020, she relocated to the USA to oversee the merging of the historically separate crystallographic and spectroscopic structural biology branches in NCI and to reinforce their cryo-electron microscopy. Her scientific focus in largely on membrane protein biology from either pathogens or the hosts they attack.

Pamela A. Williams is a senior director in the Molecular Sciences group at Astex Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge UK. She received her undergraduate degree in Mathematics from York University and her DPhil from the Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics in Oxford. She was a postdoctoral research associate at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla USA. Since 2001 she has worked as a structural biologist at Astex Pharmaceuticals supporting medicinal chemistry campaigns, using both X-ray crystallography and cryoEM to deliver protein–ligand structures of fragments to lead compounds.

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