Congratulations to Melanie Ernst for being selected for the 2021 MilliporeSigma Fellowship
Melanie Ernst is a fourth-year graduate student in the Biochemistry, Biophysics and Structural Biology (BBSB) program. She is completing her Ph.D. thesis work in the laboratory of Dr. Janice Robertson, Associate Professor in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics department, where she uses single-molecule techniques to study the folding of ion channels in membranes.
Melanie joined the BBSB program after receiving a Bachelor of Science in Biological Chemistry from Mannheim University of Applied Sciences in Mannheim, Germany. During her undergraduate studies, Melanie studied red blood cell physiology and the biocompatibility of artificial red blood cells. (more…)
Mr. Matthew A. Cruz joined the lab of Dr. Gregory Bowman, Associate Professor, in the department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, where he studies the relationship between an ebolavirus protein’s structural dynamics and its function. Through computational and experimental techniques he is measuring how changes in protein dynamics affect RNA binding. Matthew is applying this research to find drugs that disrupt protein dynamics to combat ebolavirus infections. 
Jasmine is a fifth-year graduate student in the Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology (BBSB) program. She is doing her PhD thesis work in the lab of Dr. Andrea Soranno, where she studies how sequence composition of intrinsically disordered regions within a protein can affect interactions with both proteins and nucleic acids using single-molecule fluorescence spectroscopy.