Pandemics and Alertness member WG3 (Complementary and enabling techniques), LINXS Fellow

Vice Dean, Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. Director of the Instruct ERIC Centre in Finland (Instruct-FI) for structural cell biology

Sarah Butcher trained as an Applied Biologist at the University of Bath, subsequently working on vaccine production for meningitis at the National Public Health Institute, before moving to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)in Heidelberg to work on enveloped virus structures using cryoEM for her PhD, which was awarded by Birkbeck College, University of London. In 1996, she moved to the MRC Virology Unit in Glasgow to establish a cryoEM unit and to work on human cytomegalovirus, before returning to University of Helsinki to take up a postdoctoral position. She established her own group in 2001 and became a professor in 2008. She established cryoEM in Finland in 2000 and ran the national cryoEM facility until early this year, when she became Vice Dean of the Faculty, responsible for research and infrastructure. Finland joined the Instruct ERIC in 2019, and she has led the Instruct Centre in Finland since then, coordinating the national integrated structural biology infrastructure, and currently chairs the Instruct ERIC Council. She is an elected member of EMBO and the Finnish Society of Science and Letters. Her research team of 14 focuses on viral structure, function, and inhibition, with an emphasis on flaviviruses and picornaviruses.