Paulina Dominiak

Paulina Dominiak will introduce the section

Electron Diffraction and Quantum Crystallography

Paulina Dominiak completed her Master in Science with honors in Chemistry (2000) and Biology (2001) at the University of Warsaw. She received her Ph.D. degree in Chemistry in 2005, with honors, from the University of Warsaw. Her supervisor was Prof. Krzysztof Wozniak. Her thesis was dedicated to weak interactions in organic and protein crystals studied with X-ray crystallography, including experimental charge density analysis. During her studies she visited twice NASA Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, in the US, to work with dr Ewa Ciszak. She did her postdoctoral research under prof. Philip Coppens supervision, at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, in the US. She spent there two years (2005-2006), working firstly on time-resolved crystallography and then in the charge density field, developing a data bank of atomic electron densities, later on, called the University at Buffalo Databank (UBDB). In 2007 she moved back to the University of Warsaw, Chemistry Department, where she got an Assistant Professor position. Here she was further developing the UBDB and working on its applications to X-ray crystallography and structural biology. For that work, she received a habilitation degree in Chemical Sciences in 2013. In 2017 she got the permanent Associate Professor position and three years later, in 2020 she received the Professor title and Full Professor position.

Paulina is leading the Electron Density Modelling Group at the Biological and Chemical Research Center of the University of Warsaw. Her research is focused on quantum crystallography. Her group is developing new electron density modeling methods applicable to X-ray and electron crystallography, structural chemistry, and molecular biology. Her group is developing the MATTS data bank (successor of UBDB) to be used in TAAM refinements and evaluation of electrostatic properties and interaction energies in molecular crystals and protein-ligand complexes. Currently, she concentrates on the introduction of more accurate electron scattering factors to electron crystallography.

Paulina published more than 85 original research papers with an H-index of 32 and >3100 citations. In 2020 she was elected the chair of the IUCr Commission on Quantum Crystallography. She is also elected member of the Committee on Crystallography, Polish Academy of Sciences and one of the co-editors of Acta Cryst. A.