Helen is a structural biologist at Birkbeck, University of London, where she built up a cryo electron microscopy lab.

She was educated at McGill University, Montreal, and at Kings College London. Her research career started at Kings, then the Centre d'Etudes Nucléaires, Grenoble, and Oxford University, before settling at Birkbeck.

Her research is on macromolecular machines, both in vitro and in their cellular context. Major interests are the mechanisms of molecular chaperones in assisting protein folding, unfolding and disaggregation, as well as the actions of intracellular pathogens and pore forming toxins on host membranes.