Dr. Elizabeth Villa
Professor of pediatrics
Elizabeth Villa, Ph.D. is a Professor of Molecular Biology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of
California San Diego
She was born in Mexico, where she studied Physics as an undergraduate. She completed her PhD in Biophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Fulbright Fellow. She was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich. She was recruited to UC San Diego in 2014.
Dr. Villa was the recipient of an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award to pursue high-risk high-reward research developing cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) and new technological and computational techniques to advance structural cell biology.
She was named a Pew Scholar in 2017, and she was selected to become a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2021.