Sonya Hanson, Ph.D.

Sonya Hanson joined the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Biology in 2021. Her research focuses on structural and molecular biophysics, particularly the modeling and analysis of experimental data and simulations to understand the molecular mechanisms of key biological processes. She has a B.S. in biophysics from the University of Southern California and received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Oxford, studying the temperature-sensitive transient receptor potential (TRP) ion channels. Prior to joining the CCB, Hanson was a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics, Columbia University, and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. In her research, she combined experimental and computational methods to study temperature-sensitive bacterial sodium channels, extracted continuous conformational heterogeneity from cryo-EM datasets, and how designed better-targeted therapies to kinases.