CV

Selected recent activity

Career overview

Current appointment

Associate Professor at Imperial College London, Department of Infectious Disease, from November 2024

Previous appointments

Principal Investigator at UCL Institute of Prion Diseases; Senior Research Fellow at UCL MRC Prion Unit; postdoctoral research positions at Birkbeck College London and the University of Oxford

Education

PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Imperial College London; MRes and BSc training at Jagiellonian University, with ERASMUS fellowship at Aarhus University, Denmark

Highlights

Polymathy

Research spanning matrix biology, cytoskeletal dynamics, cryo-EM, prion biology, and live-cell imaging

Recognition

Invited and keynote speaker at international meetings in structural biology, biophysics, neurodegeneration, protein aggregation, and infectious disease

Funding

MRC Career Development Award Fellow and recipient of CJD Foundation grants

Publications

Publications across multiple fields, from collagen remodelling and microtubule dynamics to prion structure, strain diversity, and imaging of protein misfolding in living cells

Leadership

Teaching, curriculum development, leading Molecular Basis of Human Disease stream within Biomedical Research MRes at Imperial, leading Imperial's iGEM 2026 team

Imperial profile

Contact

Email
smanka@ic.ac.uk