Alice Pyne

Dr Alice L. B. Pyne is a Senior Lecturer, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, head of the Royce Nanocharacterisation laboratory in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Sheffield. Her research combines high-resolution atomic force microscopy (AFM) and image analysis to determine how the structural and conformational heterogeneity in individual DNA molecules affect fundamental biological processes. Alice received an MSci in Physics from the University of Bristol in 2009, and an EngD in biophysics from the London Centre for Nanotechnology, University College London, in 2015. She was awarded an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship, followed by an MRC Rutherford Innovation Fellowship, to establish an independent research programme in high resolution biomolecular AFM. Throughout her career, Alice has worked closely with industry to develop novel AFM methods capable of routinely resolving the DNA double helix on individual molecules. She has pioneered these methods to achieve time-resolved imaging of DNA at the sub-molecular scale, showing DNA molecules twisting and “dancing” in ways that had not previously been accessible. Alice is spearheading an international effort to promote quantitative tools for analysis in AFM (www.github.com/AFM-SPM). She is building a community in the biosciences that adopts her high-resolution imaging methods, enabled by developing an automated image analysis pipeline TopoStats which combines molecular identification and conformation determination into a single tool.