Dr Maria Anastasina

Dr. Maria Anastasina’s interests focus on functional and structural studies of viruses and virus-host interactions. Dr. Anastasina received her Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Helsinki in 2015 for the work on influenza A virus-host interactions, mechanisms of innate immune responses to the virus, and viral immune evasion. From 2015 to 2017, she served as a scientist at a small enterprise Protobios LLC in Tallinn, Estonia, adapting the company’s proprietary immunoprofiling technology for the search of viral biomarkers in clinical samples. In 2017 she returned to the University of Helsinki as a postdoctoral fellow, where within the Macromolecular Structure and Function group, she leads research on Flaviviruses and SARS-CoV2. Dr. Anastasina’s current focus is on the molecular and structural basis of virus entry and replication, and on the identification of host dependency factors, intending to provide mechanistic details for antiviral discovery and to identify hit antiviral compounds.