Anna Loveland, PhD

“Science is really observation. As a child, I was always encouraged to watch things in my environment — bugs in the garden or how plants are growing.”

Anna Loveland is a postdoctoral researcher at University of Massachusetts Medical School where she uses cryo-EM techniques to study ribosome structure during mRNA translation and peptide elongation.

Loveland’s first research experience came when she was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University in Dr. Rachel Green’s lab. From here, she then earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University, where she worked with Dr. Antoine van Oijen and Dr. Johannes Walter to study DNA replication with single molecule techniques. As she gathered a deeper insight into the DNA replication machinery, she realized that she really wanted to “see” them at work. This motivation led her to take up a post-doctoral position in 2012 in Dr. Niko Grigorieff’s lab at Brandeis University, where she learned cryo-electron microscopy and worked on different projects, including structural studies of the spliceosome and the study of stringent response activation on the ribosome.

Thanks to advances in technology, her work can illuminate mechanisms that have been dissected only biochemically before.