Annalisa Pastore

Pastore studied chemistry at the University of Naples Federico II. She earned a master's degree in 1981 and her PhD in 1987. She worked as an exchange student with Richard R. Ernst at ETH Zurich and also at the University of Wisconsin.[7]

Pastore started her career at the University of Oxford as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biochemistry, working alongside Iain Donald Campbell.[8][9] Pastore was subsequently appointed a staff scientist position at European Molecular Biology Laboratory in 1988. In 1991 she was made group leader of the Structures Program.[10] She joined the National Institute for Medical Research in 1991. She has solved several structures on the Protein Data Bank. She was made an honorary professor at University College London.[1] She took a one-year sabbatical at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research.[7] During this time, she filed several patents related to allergens and their uses.[11]

Pastore worked at King's College London from 2013 to 2018.[12] She has secured several million pounds of funding from Medical Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.[13] She works on the molecular basis of neurodegeneration.[14] She looks at diseases caused by protein aggregation, including Huntington's disease and Machado–Joseph disease.[12] She also studies pathologies that are a result of misfunctioning of the iron metabolism, including Friedreich's ataxia.[12] She is interested the structure and function of these diseases and uses a range of characterisation techniques, including AFM, EM and ITC calorimetry.[12] She served as the Field Chief Editor for Frontiers Media Molecular Biosciences.[15] She serves as an editor of PeerJ.[9]

In 2018 Pastore was the first woman to be appointed full professor at the faculty of Science of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.[5][16]