PIBS 20th Speed Mentoring View Other Sessions

Biophysics Alum

I am just beginning my career as an Assistant Professor – I will not be starting my lab full-time until January 2020. This means I am a great person to talk to if you have questions about postdocing and finding a job, but not so much about what it is actually like to be a professor. I got my B.S. in 2009 from Washington University in St. Louis, where I majored in chemical engineering and mathematics and decided that I wanted to study protein folding. Immediately upon moving to Michigan I was convinced by my eventual advisors Charles Brooks and Hashim Al-Hashimi to study RNA folding instead. Over the course of 5 great years I ran countless hours of molecular dynamics simulations and witnessed the nadir of Michigan Football, graduating in 2014 with my degree in Biophysics. I then moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I have been doing a postdoc with Kevin Weeks developing hybrid chemical/computational methods for characterizing RNA structure in cells. At Baylor, my lab will focus on deploying these technologies to understand how mRNA structure encodes post-transcriptional regulation in healthy and diseased cells.