McCully Lab gears up for summer research

June 18, 2019

The McCully Lab gathered for dinner at fan-favorite Jasmine Thai to celebrate students who are graduating or moving on to new jobs this summer and welcome new arrivals to the lab.

Recently graduated seniors, Matt Gill and Emily Hamlin will be moving on to new jobs next month! Matt will be a Research Assistant at Talis Biomedical working on development, and Emily is currently deciding between job offers. Matt also recently submitted his Honors Thesis entitled, "Molecular dynamics simulations elucidate the structural determinants of protein thermostability in a designed variant of the globular activation domain of human procarboxypeptidase A2," based on his work in the lab.

Junior Parwana Khazi will be conducting research at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on treatments for substance use disorders through a NIH/NIDA summer internship program. Junior Catrina Nguyen will be heading south to intern with Thermo Fisher in San Diego.

Meanwhile, Andrew Bigler (Bio/Chem/Music '20), Ezra Hsieh (Bio '21), and Lauren Yearwood (Bio/Neuro '20) will be joining the lab, funded by a DeNardo Grant to support research in the new WAVE computation space at SCU and supported by SCU's REAL Program. Each will be pursuing separate molecular dynamics simulation projects investigating the balance between structure, dynamics, and function in different sets of proteins. Lily Schumacher (Biochem/Studio Art '21) will be joining the lab as well supported by a Clare Boothe Luce Fellowship to support her project, "DNA Binding Ability of Thermostable Proteins and Chimeras."

Finally, Juniors Lauren Verheyden and Natali Gonzalez will be returning for the summer to continue their research using EMSAs and equilibrium unfolding with CD to quantify the trade-off between stability and function in our three-helix bundle DNA-binding proteins. Jennifer Young (Math/CS '19) continues pursuing a Masters degree in Computer Engineering while popping in from time to time to consult on her computational TIM barrel project.

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