William Wan
Assistant Professor
Department of Biochemistry
Center for Structural Biology

William obtained a bachelors degree in biochemistry from Binghamton University. There, he performed undergraduate research in the lab of Anna Tan-Wilson studying plant proteolytic enzymes. He then went on to get his PhD from Vanderbilt University in the Chemical and Physical Biology Program. In the lab of Gerald Stubbs, he studied the structure and function of prion and amyloid proteins, with a specific focus on the fungal prion HET-s. His doctoral research involved the use of non-crystalline X-ray fiber diffraction, along with a number of other molecular biology and biophysical methods.

After finishing his doctoral studies, William had two postdocotoral fellowships in Germany learning cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET). First, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of John Briggs, then at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. There he focused on the structural studies of the filoviruses Ebola and Marburg viruses. The difficulties in studying these viruses also required a number of developments in data collection and processing methods. Next, he went on to become a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Wolfgang Baumeister at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried. There he worked on cellular tomography, with an emphasis on image processing methods.