Marta Filizola, PhD, Dean of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Sharon and Frederick Klingenstein/Nathan Kase, MD Professor of Pharmacological Sciences and Neuroscience
Dr. Filizola’s research lab focuses on obtaining rigorous mechanistic insights into the structure, dynamics, and functions of important classes of membrane proteins and prominent drug targets, such as G protein-coupled receptors, transporters, channels, and beta 3 integrins.
Her lab uses several computational structural biology tools and rational drug design approaches, ranging from molecular modeling to bioinformatics, cheminformatics, molecular dynamics simulations, free-energy perturbations, and machine learning.
Her team’s work is ultimately geared toward informing the design of improved therapeutics.
Marta Filizola is herself a study in diversity. Born in Italy and educated there, in Spain, and in the United States, she’s a biophysicist and academic leader, a visionary computational drug hunter, and a dean and professor with both a dynamic personality and a drive to make a difference in science and medicine—for her research team and for humanity. She’s an agent of change for young scientists in a new academic world where more opportunities are emerging for scientists from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds.
Her research program is by nature interdisciplinary, she says. The team’s computational work requires a quantitative scientific background, with chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and bioinformaticians. They work closely with a number of experimental collaborators, including structural biologists, molecular biologists, cell biologists, synthetic chemists, behavioral scientists, and physician-scientists. She cites her lab’s scientific discoveries in the field of membrane proteins and drug discovery as tangible products of having such a richly diverse team.
“My team is professionally diverse, and the lab members and our collaborators come from all over the world,” she says. The geographic representation is far-reaching, including people from Asia, Australia/Oceania, Europe, North America, and South America.
“But the team’s diversity is not limited to nationality, culture, native spoken language, scientific background, or education,” she says. “This rich diversity also includes differences in race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, as well as the realms of faith, religion, and spirituality.”
She adds: “This mixture brings a diversity of thought, conceptualization, and creativity to the biomedical problems we tackle. We are firmly convinced it lays the foundation for groundbreaking discoveries and innovation in science and medicine.”
She comments that the success of her staff and all the biomedical researchers at Mount Sinai has been and continues to be the product of their interdisciplinary approach, diversity of thought and creativity.
She fosters a culture of respect through open discussions, active training, and mentoring. Day-to-day, she says, she “pays attention to all matters related to diversity, equity, and supporting people from backgrounds that are underrepresented in science and medicine.” She also ensures that there are diverse slates of candidates for any open positions in her lab.
Dr. Filizola believes that “the microcosms of basic science labs provide many valid examples of diversity, inclusion, and equity that eventually can be used as models to foster inclusion in the macrocosm that is Mount Sinai.”
Mount Sinai “brings a diversity of thought, conceptualization, and creativity to the biomedical problems we tackle. We are firmly convinced it lays the foundation for groundbreaking discoveries and innovation in science and medicine.”
Dr. Filizola believes it’s the job of the leaders of Mount Sinai’s research laboratories to ensure that the environment is inclusive, equitable, accessible, and highly adaptive. “Ultimately,” she says, she and her leadership team “are held accountable for creating an unbiased, welcoming environment for all.”
Photo Credit: Claudia Paul, January-February 2020