Ana Paula Arruda is an assistant professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her PhD in Biochemistry at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and completed postdoctoral training at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the cellular mechanisms that enable metabolic adaptation to nutritional fluctuations, with a particular emphasis on the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and its dynamic interactions with other organelles. Arruda’s laboratory found that in liver, obesity leads to major intracellular architectural remodelling of the endoplasmic reticulum characterised by the loss of ER sheets and increase of ER tubules, which is associated with decreased ER folding capacity, unbalanced lipogenesis and stress. They also found that obesity leads to key alterations in the ER’s physical contact sites with mitochondria and plasma membrane, which result in a widespread problem in Ca2+ signalling in the cell. Research in Arruda's lab aims to understand how remodelling of the ER structure and contact sites with other organelles translate in alterations in metabolic regulation during nutritional fluctuations in physiology and metabolic diseases.