Dr Elvira Infante is a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Physics, King's College London. She is in the Biological Physics & Soft Matter (BPSM) group led by Professor Sergi Garcia-Manyes, where she employs multidisciplinary approaches to investigate how mechanical forces influence cellular behaviour. She was previously a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institut Pasteur, based in the Cell Polarity, Migration and Cancer laboratory. Her work focuses on understanding how cytoskeleton components, particularly intermediate filaments contribute to cell mechanics, migration, and cancer progression. In recent work, she has investigated how the mechanical environment in tumours, such as compression can influence cell survival, notably how cells respond to DNA damage, and how cytoskeletal elements like vimentin regulates these effects.

Research

• Mechanics of the nuclear envelope
• Cytoskeletal components in cellular mechanics
• Mechano‑directional transport of proteins across nuclear pores
• Cancer cell migration

Publications 

1. Intratumoral Heterogeneity of Vimentin Modulates Nuclear Mechanotransduction, DNA Damage Response and Cancer Cell Survival
2. Structural anisotropy results in mechano-directional transport of proteins across nuclear pores
3. RhoU forms homo-oligomers to regulate cellular responses
4. The ESCRT machinery counteracts Nesprin-2G-mediated mechanical forces during nuclear envelope repair
5. The mechanical stability of proteins regulates their translocation rate into the cell nucleus
6. LINC complex-Lis1 interplay controls MT1-MMP matrix digest-on-demand response for confined tumor cell migration
7. p63/MT1-MMP axis is required for in situ to invasive transition in basal-like breast cancer