Affiliation: Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Illinois Chicago

Alexandra Naba is an associate professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Illinois Chicago and a member of the University of Illinois Cancer Center. Alexandra received her PhD from the Curie Institute in Paris, France, where she studied the role of the membrane-cytoskeleton linker, ezrin, in normal and tumor cell adhesion in the laboratory of Pr. Daniel Louvard under the supervision of Dr. Monique Arpin. For her postdoctoral training, Alexandra joined the laboratory of Dr. Richard Hynes at MIT, where she developed the first proteomic and bioinformatic pipelines to comprehensively characterize the extracellular matrix composition of tissues, thereby defining the concept of “matrisome” and pioneering the field of ECM proteomics, also known as “matrisomics.”