Vera Pfanzagl is an Elise-Richter Fellow at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna. She has completed her PhD within the framework of the international PhD program “Biomolecular Technology of Proteins”, where she worked on structure-function relationship of bacterial heme peroxidases. During this time, she became interested in understanding the structural changes and dynamics involved in and guiding enzymatic reactions. During her postdoctoral studies she started working on human heme peroxidases, a group of 5 homologous enzymes that utilize a common fold and cofactor to catalyze the formation of reactive oxidants for widely diverging purposes ranging from innate immune response to hormone biosynthesis. Her current focus is on understanding the minute structural differences between these five enzymes in order to answer fundament biochemical and biophysical questions regarding their divergent substrate specificities and allow the design of more potent and specific inhibitors.