Andrea Dessen, a chemical engineer graduated from the University of Rio de Janeiro, did her thesis at New York University. This work was followed by two postdoctoral fellowships at Albert Einstein College of Medicine (New York) and at Harvard Medical School (Boston) in the laboratory of Professor Don C. Wiley. Wishing to continue in the field of crystallography, she worked at the Genetics Institute/Pfizer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before coming to France, where she was recruited at the CNRS in the group of Dr Otto Dideberg at the IBS in 2000. Since 2012, she is CNRS Research Director, where she leads the Bacterial Pathogenesis group at IBS, as well as a second group at the Laboratório Nacional de Biociências (LNBio/CNPEM) in Campinas, São Paulo, thanks to a partnership of the type International Associated Laboratory between CNRS and CNPEM in Brazil.

Both groups are interested in the structural and functional characterization of bacterial virulence factors and bacterial wall biosynthetic machinery, as well as in the development of new compounds with antibacterial activity from natural product chemical libraries. The main techniques employed by both teams include X-ray crystallography, electron microscopy, high throughput screening and chemical characterization of natural products, as well as biochemical, biophysical and microbiological approaches.