David Aragão

Australian Synchrotron, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Dr. David Aragão studied organic chemistry at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCT-UNL, Portugal). From early  undergraduate  days  he  got  interested  in  structural  biology  having  spend  time  in  international laboratories like the EMBL, Grenoble, France and University of Georgia, Athens, USA. After graduating in chemistry  David  worked  for  a  2-year  period  as  a  research  assistant  in  Protein  Crystallography  with particular emphasis on metalloproteins (2000-2001). From here he then followed to a joined Ph.D between the  European  Synchrotron  Radiation  Facility  (ESRF,  France)  and  the  Instituto  de  Tecnologia  Química  e Biológica  (ITQB-UNL,  Portugal)  where  the  metalloproteins  research  path  was  expanded  to  enzymes involved  in  bacterial  biofilm  formation.  In  2008  he  moved  to  Ireland,  under  Prof.  Martin  Caffrey's supervision, as a NHI funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow (University of Limerick) and later successfully obtaining a prestigious IEF Marie Curie Fellowship to work at Trinity College Dublin. During this period he specialized in the membrane protein field working in diverse important targets from GPCRs, membrane metalloproteins  and  several  P.  aeruginosa  membrane  proteins  involved  in  biofilm,  membrane  kinetics, ABC-transporters  and  others.  In  2011  he  joined  the  Australian  Synchrotron  for  a  two  year  period  as  a beamline postdoc and after a brief stunt jointly appointed by the Australian Synchrotron and Victor Chang Cardiac  Research  Institute  he  became  a  Beamline  Scientist  the  Australian  Synchrotron.  His  current research  interests  lie  in  field  of  membrane  structural  biology  namely  membrane  metalloproteins,  ABC- transporters,  ATP  synthases  but  also  crystallography  and  beamline  method  developments  related  to micron-beams, lipid cubic phase, multi-crystal data merging just to name a few.