Chi-Min Ho, PhD

Dr. Chi-Min Ho earned her B.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, then worked on membrane protein structure determination in Professor Robert Stroud’s group at UCSF. In 2011, she joined the Infectious Diseases Division at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, where she worked for three years in small molecule drug discovery for infectious diseases before moving on to pursue a doctoral degree in 2014. She completed her Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Biophysics & Structural Biology at UCLA in 2019 under the mentorship of Professor Hong Zhou and joined the Faculty in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at Columbia University in January 2020. Dr. Ho is a Pew Biomedical Scholar, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Investigator in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease, and recipient of the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (DP5).

Research in the Ho Lab focuses on understanding how malaria parasites co-opt and remodel membranes at the host-pathogen interface. As a graduate student, Dr. Ho pioneered the use of single-particle cryoEM to elucidate the structures and mechanisms of endogenous malarial protein complexes purified directly from malaria parasites. She determined the structure and mechanism of an essential malarial membrane protein complex known as the Plasmodium Translocon of Exported Proteins (PTEX), which she purified directly from malaria parasites via an epitope tag inserted into the endogenous locus of a PTEX subunit using CRISPR-Cas9. Following this work, she developed an endogenous structural proteomics approach for identification and structure determination of novel protein complexes enriched untagged from challenging endogenous sources, using mass spectrometry and near-atomic resolution cryoEM density maps reconstructed ab initio, and cryoID, a program she designed to semi-autonomously identify proteins in cryoEM maps of unknown protein complexes.

Now, the Ho Lab develops and applies novel approaches combining cutting-edge techniques in malaria parasite gene-editing, single-particle cryoEM and in situ cryoET with membrane protein protein biochemistry and biophysics to overcome longstanding barriers to high resolution structural and biochemical study of malaria parasites.