Dr. Sandro Ataide was appointed Lecturer in the School of Molecular Bioscience at The University of Sydney in 2012, in the area of Structural Biology with emphasis on X-ray Crystallography. Dr. Ataide received his BSc in Chemistry at UNICAMP (Brazil) in 1999 and MSc in Biochemistry at the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil) in 2001. He was awarded his PhD from the Ohio State University (USA) in 2006 where he worked with Professor Michael Ibba studying how aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRS) have evolved to efficiently select their substrates (amino acid and tRNA) in order to provide new insights into the development of inhibitors for these essential enzymes. He moved to his Postdoctoral work with Professor Jennifer Doudna at UC Berkeley (USA) at the end of 2006 where he started his crystallographer career studying the bacterial Signal Recognition Particle (SRP). In 2009 he moved to ETH Zurich (Switzerland) to continue his work with SRP and the eukaryotic ribosome with Professor Nenad. His research targeted the structural and molecular characterization of RNA molecules in RNA-protein complexes using structural biology methods. In 2012 he was awarded the Selby Research Award for his excellence in research targeting eukaryotic RNA-protein complexes. His lab is interested in determining the structure and function of eukaryotic RNA-protein complexes and ncRNAs involved in cell maintenance.