Team Members
Max Renner
Assistant Professor, Group Leader
max.renner[at]umea.se
Max obtained his PhD from Oxford University, studying structures of pneumovirus transcription components with Prof Jon Grimes and Prof Juha Huiskonen. Following his doctoral work, he secured a Sir Henry Wellcome fellowship to investigate flaviviruses and their interaction with host factors. He then relocated to the University of Göttingen to join the team of Prof. Dr. Rubén Fernández-Busnadiego where his work focused on in situ structural biology of cardiac cells. Since May 2023 Max has taken up a position as assistant professor at the Department of Chemistry of Umeå University.
Rupesh Balaji Jayachandran
PhD student
rupesh.jayachandran[at]umu.se
Rupesh graduated with an MSc in Biochemistry and Structural Biology from the University of Helsinki. For his MSc thesis, he identified the epitope of a patient-derived monoclonal antibody on the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein using cryo-EM under the supervision of Dr. Ilona Rissanen and Prof. Juha Huiskonen. He is currently a PhD student in the group, studying the replication machinery of pneumo- and henipaviruses using cryo-EM.
Erwan Quignon
Postdoctoral scholar
erwan.quignon[at]umu.se
Erwan obtained his PhD from Strasbourg University, where he investigated the genome structure of Influenza A viruses under the supervision of Roland Marquet. To expand his expertise, he pursued an additional Master’s degree in Bioinformatics at the University of Rouen-Normandie. Supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Kempe Foundation, he has joined the lab to study viral factories of human metapneumovirus with in situ cryo-EM.
Jane Corwin
PhD student
Jane holds a master’s in structural biology of pathogens from University Grenoble Alpes. Her master’s thesis, completed at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Grenoble, focused on structural characterization of proteins involved in mitochondrial RNA-editing in Trypanosoma. Jane has undertaken a doctoral project in the group examining the assembly of metapneumoviruses using cryo-ET and biochemistry techniques.
Marcus Sundqvist
Master's student
Marcus is carrying out his Master's thesis project in our group and will be studying synthetic proteins designed by machine learning approaches and their capacity to inhibit the viral replication machinery.