Integrated Program in Biochemistry Graduate Student
hailing from
West Chester, Pennsylvania
Undergraduate
B.S. in Biology and Chemistry, Loyola University Maryland (2012)
What research experiences paved your way to the Coon lab?
Following graduation I worked at the NIH Bethesda Campus in the lab of Curtis Harris until late 2014. Curt’s lab is a cancer biomarkers lab, and my job was to study the roles of certain microRNAs and lncRNAs in bowel cancer and inflammatory bowel diseases. After relocating to Charlottesville, VA I joined the lab of Jochen Zimmer at the University of Virginia as a research technician. Jochen’s lab focused on glycobiology and membrane transport, and for the next two and a half years I worked on elucidating the structure and mechanism of hyaluronan synthase (HAS), an enzyme that has been recalcitrant to crystallography. This work eventually led us to use MS to characterize crosslink modifications to HAS and UDP-modifications to hyaluronan, and I realized the power MS has to address diverse problems.
I also realized it was about time for graduate school and taking things to the next level. After interviewing here at UW-Madison, I was very impressed with the university and the caliber of its research programs. I quickly noticed how happy graduate students were here. I am tremendously privileged to be able do my graduate work at UW. I chose my lab rotations to ensure I was outside of my comfort zone each time. My first hint at what Coon group would be like came with Dr. Coon’s presentation in the faculty parade. Several meetings with him later, and after rotating through his lab, I was convinced it was too good to miss.
“There really are no boundaries to the lab’s ambition and creativity, and the wide breadth of projects tackling everything from important biological questions to cutting-edge tech development speaks to that.”
How are you finding the Coon group?
What attracted me most to Coon Research Group was that it was clearly going to be a challenging environment for me. The independence, expertise and professionalism of the people in Coon group left a big impression on me, and it made me realize that this is a lab that will give you back what you put into it. Initiative and development of new skills are valued here. There really are no boundaries to the lab’s ambition and creativity, and the wide breadth of projects tackling everything from important biological questions to cutting-edge tech development speaks to that. I’m looking forward to the coming years here.
At the moment I am coordinating with Dr. Coon to determine what projects I will work on, but I’m particularly excited by technology development for single cell proteomics. There are several bottlenecks in this area because it is still so new, and though several groups have attacked the issue, there is no real high-throughput platform for it, so it will make fertile ground for future work.
