Dr. Jailson (Jay) Brito Querido has accepted an offer to become a faculty member in Biological Chemistry, the Center for RNA Biomedicine, and the Life Sciences Institute this fall. A native of Cape Verde, Jay received undergraduate and M.S. degrees at the University of Lisbon. For his Ph.D., Jay worked with Dr. Yaser Hashem in Strasbourg, France, using cryo-EM to study parasite-specific ribosomal proteins. Jay then moved to Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan’s lab at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology for postdoctoral work, where he has tackled longstanding questions surrounding translation initiation on eukaryotic mRNAs. Most prominently, Jay determined the structure of a 48S translation initiation complex and suggested a novel mechanism for ribosome recruitment and mRNA scanning (Brito Querido et al., Science 2020).
Jay is currently exploring translation initiation on structured mRNAs and the role of the human tumor suppressor protein PDCD4 in regulating translation. He has exciting plans to continue in this field, with a goal of understanding the many ways in which RNA helicases regulate gene expression in health and disease. Jay’s laboratory will be located on the fourth floor of MSRB II.
Welcome to Jay, his wife Rita Medina Costa, and their son Diogo!
