Hungarian bio-chemist and bio-informatician Agnes Toth-Petroczy just joined the Research Faculty of the MPI-CBG and the neighboring Center for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD). With her group, Agnes wants to study the phenotypic plasticity of proteins. Her team wants to understand the mechanism behind proteins being able to remain robust to environmental changes and errors during their synthesis, and to evolve novel functions at the same time. Revealing the evolutionary potential of phenotypes to create innovations is expected to help understanding genetic diseases. To do so, the Toth-Petroczy group combines high-throughput data with rigorous computational studies and provides hypotheses for experimental validation.
After pursuing her Master in Chemistry at Eötvös-Loránd-University Budapest, Toth-Petroczy did her PhD in Life Sciences at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. She then moved to the USA to work as a postdoc in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. Before starting her own research group at the CSBD, Agnes worked on clinical genetics as Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “I am excited about joining the MPI-CBG and CSBD, and settling in Dresden feels like the perfect place for my research plans and for my family”, Toth-Petroczy says.
We are very happy to have Agnes Toth-Petroczy complementing our interdisciplinary research faculty and that she joins us as the first female research group leader at the CSBD. Welcome, Agnes!