A new research home in St. Paul is bringing longtime CBS faculty member Carrie Wilmot exciting new opportunities for collaboration.
For Carrie Wilmot, it’s all about the molecules.
Wilmot, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics and the newest member of the BioTechnology Institute, is a structural biologist. Her focus is on the physical structure proteins take that allows them to do their job of catalyzing life-giving chemical reactions within cells.
But she’s a structural biologist with a twist: She loves connecting her work with that of scientists in related disciplines, creating a network of knowledge that weaves together structure, function and, ultimately, application. In other words, she’ll tell you what a molecule looks like and how it does its job, then team with chemists, chemical engineers, microbiologists and others to explore not only why, but also what we might do with that knowledge to make the world a better place. Read More
Will Harcombe’s fascination with evolution and ecosystem function adds a dynamic dimension to the quest to better understand — and tap the power of — the microorganisms in our lives.
“Community” means different things to different people. To an urban planner, it’s a neighborhood bustling with people. To a landscape ecologist, it’s the collection of plants and animals that paint a riotous portrait of life on the raw canvas of a barren landscape.
To Will Harcombe, it’s a whole bunch of microbes duking it out — and occasionally teaming up — in an Erlenmeyer flask, or an intestinal tract, or a wastewater treatment plant as they work (evolutionarily speaking) to boost their survival in the moving-target milieu of other microbes working to do the same.
Harcombe, who joined the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the BioTechnology Institute through the Microbial Systems research cluster in December, studies the evolution of cooperation and competition in bacteria and other microorganisms from a molecular perspective. His goal: to understand and be able to quantitatively predict how microbial communities change over time due to the interplay of their constituents’ physiological activities. Read More
Professor Anthony Dean talks about his part-time faculty appointment in Southern China.
Tony Dean (EEB/BTI) recently accepted a part-time post at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, where he will set up a second research lab in addition to his current lab at the University of Minnesota. Here, he talks about the excitement and adventure of moving to China, along with some of the challenges he will face.
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Romas Kazlauskas brings experience from World Class University Project home to Minnesota
This summer Romas Kazlauskas (BTI/ Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biophysics) completed a 5-year collaboration with Seoul National University on lignin biorefinery as part of the World Class University Project. Run by South Korea’s Ministry of Education and National Research Foundation (NRF), the program was designed to attract leading international scientists to Korean Universities.
As part of the collaboration in Seoul, Kazlauskas developed a course on protein engineering which will be offered soon at the University of Minnesota.
Friedrich Srienc serves as Program Director at the National Science Foundation
In September 2012, longtime BTI member Friedrich Srienc (BTI/Chemical Engineering) began a 2-year appointment as Program Director for the Biotechnology, Biochemical, and Biomass Engineering (BBBE) program at the National Science Foundation (NSF). During his appointment, Srienc will play a key role in funding of basic engineering research related to cellular and biomolecular processes, including the development of enabling technologies for the biopharmaceutical, biotechnology, and bioenergy industries.
The NSF program encourages research in emerging disciplines, multidisciplinary practice, and activities which effectively incorporate educational endeavors. On leave of absence during his appointment, Srienc plans to return to University of Minnesota in the fall of 2014.
The BioTechnology Institute welcomes Dan Knights, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Dan received his PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder, with a certificate in Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology from the University’s BioFrontiers Institute. He comes to the University of Minnesota following a postdoctorate fellowship at Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His research at the University of Minnesota focuses on the functional characterization of complex host-microbe interactions, including predictive modeling of those interactions across variations in the host genome and microbial communities.
