Dr Saima Rehman

Saima’s main role at JIC is to support the electron microscopy users of the Bioimaging platform; in particular those using cryo transmission electron microscopy (in-house FEI Talos 200C and Titan KRIOS TEM-300 from eBIC (Electron Bio-Imaging Centre) Diamond Light Source (DLS UK) to study the structure of macromolecules, particularly proteins.

This involves working with macromolecules from pathogenic bacterial, plants, viruses, as well as training, supervising and troubleshooting for the platform’s numerous users.

Saima got her PhD degree in Molecular Biophysics, supervised by Prof. Richard Pickersgill (DPhil) with distinction, as well as a MSc in Biochemistry and a Bachelors Degree in Chemistry and Biological Sciences. Her background in Structural Biochemistry field helps her to obtain 3-dimentional structures of biological molecules – for example, DNA, RNA or proteins (such as enzymes in living organisms, or viral particles or megadalton complexes) at an atomic-resolution. These finding can lead to discovering medicines, vaccines or agrochemical.

She has twenty atomic structures deposited in the Protein Data Bank using X-ray crystallography, six solution structures by using Small-Angle X-ray Scattering and several structures in the EMD (Electron Microscope Database) by exploiting cryogenic- Transmission Electron Microscopy Single Particle Analysis.

Saima holds experience in Python Scripting and Artificial Intelligence (AI) needed for data processing, data analysis, structure-based drug designing and discovering vaccine targets.  Dr. Rehman is affiliated with different UK Universities namely King’s College London, Blizzard Institute Queen Mary University of London, MRC-Laboratory of Molecular Biology Cambridge University, and national Synchrotrons in worlds, Diamond Light Source, Oxford, UK, European Synchrotron France and Max-IV synchrotron in Sweden. She was awarded a Medical Research Council Grant.