Research-Active Faculty

Zhilei Chen

Research Focus: Protein engineering, biotechnology, infectious diseases, cancer therapeutics, virology

Jae-Hyun Cho

Research Focus: protein-protein interactions, NMR, crystallography, structural biology, protein motion, inhibitor development, influenza virus, thermodynamics, kinetics

Jorge Cruz-Reyes

Research Focus: RNA editing and editosomes, trypanosome RNA biology, ribonucleoprotein complexes, small guide RNA, drug development

Juan Dong

Research Focus: Molecular Genetics, Cell Signaling, Cell Biology, Plant Development

Margaret Glasner

Research Focus: protein evolution, enzyme promiscuity, metabolic pathway evolution, metabolic pathway discovery, comparative genomics

Vishal Gohil

Research Focus: mitochondria, mitochondrial respiratory chain, metals, membranes, metabolism, mitochondrial disorders, copper, cardiolipin, elesclomol, menkes disease

Jennifer Herman

Research Focus: Bacillus, bacterial genetics, cell division, development, DNA replication, gene function discovery, metabolism, morphogenesis, sporulation, uncharacterized gene function

Research Focus: signal transduction, membrane proteins, lipid membranes, lipid-activated kinases, AGC kinases, protein structure and dynamics, protein kinase C, synaptotagmin I, lipid-binding domains, xenobiotic metal ions, Pb(II) and Cd(II) toxicity, NMR

Dmitry Kurouski

Research Focus: Raman-based plant disease diagnostics, development of nano-infrared spectroscopy (afm-ir) for structural characterization of amyloids and plant waxes, photo- and electrochemical catalysis at nanosclae, forensics

Pingwei Li

Research Focus: structural biology, innate immunity, X-ray crystallography, cryogenic electron microscopy (Cryo-EM)

Paul Lindahl

Research Focus: bioinorganic, biophysical, bioanalytical, metal ions, trafficking, math modeling, Mössbauer spectroscopy, chromatography, ICP-MS, mitochondria, labile metal pools, ironomics, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Jurkat cells, hemochromatosis, mice

Wenshe Liu

Research Focus: COVID-19 drug discovery, chromatin biology, cancer epigenetics, posttranslational histone modifications, cancer drug discovery, the genetic code expansion, medicinal chemistry, structural biology, chemical biology

Thomas Meek

Research Focus: Determine chemical mechanisms of enzymes which are essential to infectious organisms, rational design of enzyme inhibitors

John Mullet

Research Focus: Developing next-generation crops through the study of genomics, gene regulatory networks, development, drought resilience, bioenergy crop design (NOT CURRENTLY TAKING GRADUATE STUDENTS)

Vladislav Panin

Research Focus: Therapeutics, Enzymology, Gene Regulation, Membrane Function, and Metabolism.

Jean-Philippe Pellois

Research Focus: membrane biochemistry, molecular engineering and probe design, cellular delivery, cell injury and regeneration

Michael Polymenis

Research Focus: cell cycle, protein synthesis, ribosomal proteins, metabolism, cell size, longevity, yeast

Frank Raushel

Research Focus: enzyme catalysis, protein engineering & design, bioinformatics, catalytic detoxification, protein structure determination, new enzyme discovery, biosynthesis of complex carbohydrates, novel enzymes from human microbiome, orphan enzymes (NOT CURRENTLY TAKING GRADUATE STUDENTS)

Hays Rye

Research Focus: molecular chaperones, protein folding, protein quality control, disaggregation, membrane dynamics, membrane fission, nanoparticle dynamics, single molecule fluorescence

James Sacchettini

Research Focus: Drug discovery and disease-related structural biology, including Tuberculosis, Malaria, Cryptosporidiosis, Chagas disease, Cancer, and Menkes syndrome (NOT CURRENTLY TAKING GRADUATE STUDENTS)

Stephen Safe

Research Focus: drug repositioning for cancer chemotherapy, NR4A receptor biology, NR4A1 ligand development and discovery, Ah receptor biology, Ah receptor ligand development and discovery, endometriosis, childhood cancers, glioblastoma

Jonathan Sczepanski

Research Focus: DNA damage and repair, DNA methylation dynamics, thymine DNA glycosylase, chromatin structure, noncoding RNA, mirror-image DNA/RNA, aptamers, nucleic acid biosensors, DNA nanotechnology.

Paul Straight

Research Focus: bacteria, microbiology, metabolism, antibiotics, signaling, microbial communities, secondary metabolites, bacillus subtilis, streptomyces, motility, bacterial genetics, mass spectrometry

Xuewu Sui

Research Focus: Lipid biology, lipid biosynthesis and regulation, membranes, neutral lipids, phospholipids, drug discovery and development, molecular pharmacology, cryo-electron microscopy, crystallography

Yuxiang Sun

Research Focus: Nutritional immunology, chronic metabolic and inflammatory diseases, aging metabolism, inflammaging, neuroinflammation and Alzheimer’s disease.

Sing Hoi Sze

Research Focus: bioinformatics, computational biology, sequence analysis, biological networks, high-throughput sequencing

Josh Wand

Research Focus: molecular recognition, drug discovery, protein dynamics, NMR spectroscopy, thermodynamics, protein engineering, protein biologics, ubiquitin E3 ligases, parkin, membrane proteins, prostate cancer, Parkinson’s disease (NOT CURRENTLY TAKING GRADUATE STUDENTS)

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