Chemistry & Biochemistry Seminars Spring 2024

Connor Bischak:Tracking and Controlling Dynamic Processes in Organic and Hybrid Semiconductors

Prof. Connor Bischak obtained a B.S. in Chemistry from Haverford College, a small liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia, PA, in 2010. He then spent a year in Germany as a Fulbright Fellow, studying insect and fish antifreeze proteins with terahertz spectroscopy. In 2011, Connor joined the lab of Prof. Naomi Ginsberg at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked on developing new ways to image solar cell materials using electron microscopy. After obtaining his Ph.D. in 2017, Connor joined the group of Prof. David Ginger at the University of Washington as a Washington Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. As a postdoctoral researcher, Connor used a combination of advanced X-ray scattering and nanoscale imaging approaches to study electronic polymer materials for bioelectronics. In 2021, Connor joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Utah as an assistant professor. His work currently focuses on understanding structural phase transitions in hybrid organic-inorganic materials for thermal energy storage and solid-state refrigeration and developing new methods to study coupled ionic-electronic transport in electronic plastic materials. 

Alumni Achievement Award 

William Lanzilotta:Anaerobic Heme Catabolism Takes a Radical Turn

William “Wild Bill” Lanzilotta obtained his undergraduate ACS Chemistry degree at Fort Lewis College in Durango Colorado, while working a professional chef and mountain bike racer. After graduating from Fort Lewis, Bill became Dr. Seefeldt’s first graduate student, where he focused on detailing the electron transfer reactions and the role of MgATP hydrolysis in nitrogenase catalysis. Following the completion of his doctoral work, Dr. Lanzilotta was awarded a USDA Postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Professor Tom Poulos at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). While at UCI Dr. Lanzilotta focused on unique heme-mediated mechanisms involved in small molecule sensing, and biological denitrification. Following his postdoctoral work, Dr. Lanzilotta went to work for Genencor International, an established biotech company that produces industrial enzymes for a number of commercial applications as well as a variety of commodity chemicals that are produced from metabolically engineered organisms. Dr. Lanzilotta arrived at the University of Georgia on September 11th 2001, where he has focused his research on the mechanism of metalloproteins involved in radical generation and radical-catalyzed chemical conversions. All of the enzymes being investigated have significant roles in metabolic processes that are essential to human health and some of the enzymes have great potential as industrial catalysts. At the foundation of all his research, is an unquenchable thirst to uncover novel metalloenzyme mechanisms. The ultimate goal is to expand the catalytic repertoire for future engineers in biotechnology. 

Yang Liu:Very fast CRISPR and DNA repair

Dr. Liu received his Ph.D. from Emory University in 2016 and then relocated to Baltimore to pursue postdoctoral training at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He started his lab as an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Utah in 2022. He has received several awards and research funding from the National Institute of Health and the American Cancer Society.

"We study how cellular machinery detects, signals, and repairs DNA lesions, a collective network known as DNA damage response (DDR). Many human diseases are associated with DDR defects, including developmental abnormalities, accelerated aging, and common cancers. In particular, we leverage state-of-the-art chemical biology, genomics, and microscopy techniques to characterize DDR processes within its genomic and cellular context. We developed a controllable CRISPR-Cas9 technology, termed very fast CRISPR (vfCRISPR) (Liu et al., Science 2020), which can induce DNA double-strand breaks (DSB) after light stimulation and with second-scale temporal resolution. This enabling technique, akin to the ‘Channelrhodopsin’ in optogenetics, allows ultrafast genome perturbation and is compatible with multi-omics and imaging methods to capture the DSB-induced alterations at the molecular, genomic, and cellular levels. Together, our interdisciplinary research in nucleic acids, gene editing, and cellular biophysics will significantly deepen our knowledge of genome maintenance and shed light on improving biotechnologies for precision genome editing."

Dawei Feng: Molecular engineering towards cost effective and highly stable organic aqueous redox flow batteries

Dawei Feng is an Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering with an affiliation in the Department of Chemistry. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. in Chemistry from Peking University and Texas A&M University respectively and did his postdoctoral training at Stanford University. His research interests are redox active materials and ion conductive materials design and synthesis and currently focusing on redox flow batteries for grid energy storage. Dawei is a recipient of ACS Inorganic Chemistry Young Investigator and the NSF CAREER award.

Delphine Farmer: Wildfire smoke: Tracking an atmospheric villain through air, leaves, and homes 

Delphine Farmer is a Professor of Chemistry at Colorado State University, where she runs a research group studying atmospheric and indoor chemistry, with particular focus on using mass spectrometry to study processes that control sources and sinks of organic gases and particles in the atmosphere. She received her BSc in Chemistry from McGill University, her MS in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from the University of California at Berkeley, and then her PhD in Chemistry from UC Berkeley. She held a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Colorado Boulder before moving to her current position at CSU in Fort Collins. She is a recipient of the 2013 Arnold and Mabel Beckman Young Investigator Award and the 2022 AGU Ascent Award. 

Katherine Davis: Examining the structural and dynamic basis for atypical heme enzyme reactivity

After formal coursework in physics and mathematics at the University of Louisville, Kate pursued doctoral research in the Dept. of Physics at Purdue University. There, under the guidance of Prof. Yulia Pushkar, she employed X-ray spectroscopic methods to study natural and artificial photosynthetic reaction centers. She subsequently conducted her postdoctoral training in the Dept. of Chemistry at Princeton University, where she was jointly mentored in enzymology and structural biology by Prof. John T. Groves (Princeton) and Prof. Amie Boal (the Pennsylvania State University), respectively. Kate joined the Department of Chemistry at Emory in January 2020. Her lab works at the interface of chemistry, physics, and biology to investigate the unique strategies enzymes employ that make them so effective, with a particular interest in developing and applying physical methods for monitoring metalloenzyme dynamics.

Wai Lun Chan: Controlling Exciton Dynamics at the Nanoscale

Wai-Lun Chan is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Kansas (KU). His current research interest is in understanding the electron and exciton dynamics in a range of materials such as organic semiconductors, 2D materials, and hybrid halide perovskites. Wai-Lun was a recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2014. He obtained his PhD degree in Materials Science from Brown University in 2007. After two postdoctoral trainings at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the University of Texas at Austin, Wai-Lun started his independent research group at KU in 2013.

Barry Willardson: Chaperone-mediated assembly of cell signaling complexes

Dr. Willardson received a BA in Chemistry from Brigham Young University and a PhD in Biochemistry from Purdue University working with professor Philip S. Low.  He did post-doctoral work at Los Alamos National Laboratory working with Mark W. Bitensity and transitioned to a staff scientist position at Los Alamos.  He then joined the faculty in Chemistry and Biochemistry at BYU. He studies the molecular mechanisms by which the cytosolic chaperonin CCT assists in the folding and assembly of cell signaling complexes, including the G protein heterotrimer and the mTORC1 and 2 complexes. He will present recent work describing the complete folding trajectory of the G protein beta 5 subunit determined by cryo-electron microscopy (Wang et al. 2023 Molecular Cell 83, 3852–3868) and the defects in folding resulting from disease-causing mutations in G beta 5. This work has changed our understanding of how the CCT chaperonin helps proteins to fold.

Dong Wang: Using High-valent Dinuclear Cobalt Complexes to Understand Aliphatic C-H Bond Activation and Functionalization by Nonheme Diiron Oxygenases

Dong grew up in China and carried out his undergraduate education at the University of Science & Technology of China, where he received his BS degree in Material Chemistry on assembling three-dimensional metal oxide nanostructures using hydrothermal methods.

Dong came to US in 2004 to pursue his PhD degree at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities under the mentoring of Prof. Lawrence Que, Jr., who had successfully persuaded Dong to make the switch to Bioinorganic Chemistry. Dong spent six years studying iron-dependent metalloenzymes and their synthetic mimics, and found himself falling in love with metals in biology and decided to devote himself to the academic career. After earning his PhD in late 2010, Dong joined the group of Prof. John T. Groves at Princeton University as a postdoctoral research associate. At Princeton Dong focused on the development of efficient and robust synthetic water oxidation catalysts that could be applied to artificial photosynthesis.

Dong joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Montana in August 2015 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2022. He is also a CoBRE investigator at the Center for Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics of UMt.

Valter Longo: Fasting Mimicking Diets Longevity and Disease

Valter Longo, PhD, is the Edna Jones Professor in Gerontology and Professor in Biological Science. He is also the Director of the USC Longevity Institute. He is interested in understanding the fundamental mechanisms of aging in yeast, mice and humans by using genetics and biochemistry techniques. He is also interested in identifying the molecular pathways conserved from simple organisms to humans that can be modulated to protect against multiple stresses and treat or prevent cancer, Alzheimer’s Disease and other diseases of aging. The focus is on the signal transduction pathways that regulate resistance to oxidative damage in yeast and mice.

Zoom Link: https://usu-edu.zoom.us/j/89894636741?pwd=clRYQmdtUmpEUmVSTFQ1c1pleElzQT09
Meeting ID: 898 9463 6741 Passcode: 710248