Alena Zíková is a group leader at the Institute of Parasitology, Biology Centre, Czech Academy of Sciences. She received her PhD in Molecular Parasitology from the University of South Bohemia in 2006. From 2005 to 2009, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Seattle Biomed, USA, on unicellular parasites of the Trypanosoma genus, infectious agents causing human and animal African trypasomiasis. She combined mass spectrometry-based and functional approaches to map mitochondrial protein-protein interaction networks to identify novel mitochondrial complexes and define new drug targets. She joined the Institute of Parasitology in 2009 as a junior research group leader. Alena is a recipient of the L'Oreal for women award, the Wichterle award and the prestigious EMBO Installation grant. In 2022, she received the ERC Consolidator Grant on intracellular signaling, which enables communication between mitochondria and the rest of the cell. She uses trypanosomes as a powerful tool to show how signals released by mitochondria influence cell fate.