Karolina Corin, PhD, is a staff scientist working on our investigations into the origins of COVID-19 and biosafety. Karolina earned her MS in mechanical engineering and PhD in biological engineering from MIT. She completed a postdoc at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and worked as a staff scientist at UCLA before joining U.S. Right to Know. ORCID ID: 0000-0003-3080-5742.

Karolina has authored or co-authored 17 peer-reviewed scientific articles that have been published in journals such as PNAS , Protein Science, EMBO, and the Journal of Molecular Biology. She has also served as a scientific peer-reviewer, holds two patents, and published pieces on long Covid in children in the LA Times and Today’s Parent. 

Much of Karolina’s research has focused on the expression, solubilization, folding, structure, and stabilization of membrane proteins, a class of proteins involved in many diseases that are notoriously difficult to study. She developed a cell-free expression platform allowing the largest number of GPCRs to date to be expressed, and demonstrated that novel surfactants like peptide detergents can be used to express, solubilize, and stabilize membrane proteins. As part of a team, she was the first to express, purify, and characterize the ligand-binding of insect olfactory receptors, and performed pioneering experiments demonstrating that a simple substitution code could be used to make GPCRs soluble without altering their structure or function.