Prof. Andrea Balan has a BA in Biological Sciences by the State University of Campinas (Unicamp, 1990), Master in Biotechnology (1994) and PhD in Microbiology (1999), both developed at the University of São Paulo – USP, Brazil. Her work was focused on the heterogeneous expression of proteins in yeast and bacteria aiming the production of biotechnological products. Dr. Balan started a post-doc in Structural Biology of Proteins at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences of the University of São Paulo working with ATP-Binding Cassette transporters from pathogenic bacteria (2000-2004), continued at the Brazilian National Laboratory of Biosciences – LNBio (2008), Campinas, and then spent 3 years at the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, USA) and the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, England), always working on Structure and Function of Proteins and protein-protein interactions. In 2010 she became research leader at the LNBio in Campinas and in 2014 she became Professor at the Department of Microbiology at the University of São Paulo in São Paulo. His area of action involves mainly the structural and functional characterization of transport proteins and their role in the mechanisms of virulence, pathogenesis and drug resistance. Also works with the structural characterization and engineering of proteins of biotechnological interest, including membrane proteins involved with the exclusion of drugs.
