Professor Rivka Isaacson

Professor Rivka Isaacson is Professor of Molecular Biophysics in the Department of Chemistry, King’s College London.

Rivka obtained a B.Sc. in Biochemistry from the University of Manchester in 1997, followed by a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Cambridge in 2001, under the supervision of Professor Sir Alan Fersht, FRS. She carried out post-doctoral research at Harvard Medical School with Professor Pamela Silver, and then at Imperial College London with Professor Steve Matthews. Subsequently, she worked at the Imperial College Drug Discovery Centre before starting her own research group in 2009 funded by an MRC New Investigator Research Grant.

Rivka is passionate about radical interdisciplinarity, conducting many projects across the arts-sciences interface, including an ongoing multimedia collaboration with London Fine Art Studios called Viewing the Invisible and a longstanding relationship with the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at Chichester University around science and literature.

Rivka currently serves on the UKRI Physics of Life steering group and the executive committee for the national Collaborative Computing Project for NMR. She was the 2021 winner of the Judith Howard prize from the Biophysical Sciences Institute at Durham University.

Research Interests

• Control of protein degradation
• Gene expression regulation in bacterial sporulation
• Membrane protein targeting
• Chaperone/Protease systems
• Quality control within the crowded cell

The Isaacson group uses biophysics techniques, including NMR spectroscopy, X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy, to probe macromolecular structure and interactions of molecules relevant to health and disease. Their research questions, largely BBSRC funded, focus on mechanisms for maintaining proteostasis within the crowded cell in both mammalian and bacterial systems.

Teaching

Rivka is module coordinator for Chemistry in Cells and also lectures in Protein Structure and Function and Molecular Biology for Chemists. She currently supervises two PhD students.

Research Centres or Groups

• KCL Centre for the Physical Sciences of Life