DrSofia Caria

Sofia is the Structural Biology Facility Manager in the Department of Life Sciences, specialising in Macromolecular Crystallography and Small-Angle X-ray Scattering. Her responsibilities include managing the crystallisation and X-ray facility within the Centre for Structural Biology, with specific responsibility for the facility's liquid handling robotics, plate sealers, and associated crystallisation peripherals. She oversees instrument maintenance, user inductions, health and safety compliance, and synchrotron data collection logistics, primarily coordinating training, beamtime, and access for Diamond Light Source. She is responsible for training students and research staff in automated crystallisation, diffraction data collection, and crystallographic computing.

Her areas of expertise bridge the full structural biology workflow, encompassing construct design, high-throughput crystallisation optimisation, seeding, ligand soaking, and fragment screening, as well as data processing, experimental phasing, molecular replacement, and structure refinement. She also brings expertise in BioSAXS data collection and analysis.

Prior to joining Imperial, Sofia spent over seven years as a Senior Scientist at Evotec in the United Kingdom, leading structural biology projects and data operations for industrial drug discovery programmes. She previously served as a Beamline Scientist on the SAXS and WAXS beamline at the

Australian Synchrotron, supporting and training the national user community, and conducted more than eight years of postdoctoral research across La Trobe University and Monash University.

She completed her Summa cum laude PhD in Pharmacy focusing on Microbiology at the Universidade de Lisboa and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in 2010, focusing on the biochemical and structural characterisation of bacterial signal transduction systems.