Malvina Papanastasiou, Ph.D.

Malvina Papanastasiou is a senior group leader and research scientist in the Proteomics Platform at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. With over twenty years of expertise in analytical chemistry, mass spectrometry, and structural biology, she leads structural proteomics efforts centered on state-of-the-art hydrogen/deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS) to uncover protein dynamics and interactions, addressing fundamental questions in health and disease. 

Papanastasiou’s group has pioneered transformative advances that redefined structural proteomics. Notably, her group developed a fully automated nanoflow HDX (nHDX) platform, achieving over a 100-fold improvement in sensitivity compared to conventional configurations. This enables routine structural analysis of challenging targets — such as membrane proteins, transcription factors, and MDa macromolecular assemblies — from femtomole-level samples. Building on this platform, her group extended nHDX-MS to high-throughput measurements at scale to map antibody epitopes and paratopes, profile ligand binding sites, and investigate how mutations affect protein conformation and stability. Her group also established the first high-throughput workflow for determining hydrogen exchange rates in complex cell lysates, as well as the first systematic characterization of how post-translational modifications alter exchange kinetics.

Prior to joining the Broad Institute in 2016, she held postdoctoral and research scientist positions at Northeastern University, the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology of FORTH in Greece, and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, including an EMBO visiting fellowship at the University of Southern Denmark.

Papanastasiou obtained a Ph.D. and M.S. in chemistry at Manchester Metropolitan University and a B.Sc. in environmental sciences from the University of the Aegean.

Contact Malvina Papanastasiou via email at malpap@broadinstitute.org.