Laura is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. Her lab works with things related to drug resistance, trying to understand the mechanisms of drug resistance as well as formulating new molecules that could be used to treat drug-resistant bacteria or cancer. When not in the lab, Laura is teaching students the same biochem lab techniques she uses in her own research.
Transcript
Well, my name is Laura Dassama. I am an assistant professor of chemistry at Stanford University. My lab works some things related to drug resistance, so we try to understand new drug-resistance mechanisms and we try to also work on the development of new molecules that we hope can some day be used to treat wither drug-resistant bacteria or cancer. We study a family of proteins, lots of molecules and cells that bacteria typically employ when they encounter a new drug and what these molecules do is to just raid the drug from the bacteria cell, so it essentially pumps it out and we try to understand how those molecules can recognize a wide variety of different drugs and the hope then is that if we understand how they do this, we can target them for inhibition or degradation or something, we can stop them for doing this recognition and efflux and exporting of drugs. We also like to make molecules. I don't know if you currently hear about the fact that we are not making new antibiotics even though we're seeing an increased resistance to all of the drugs we currently use to treat bacterial infections and so, my lab looks at how nature makes molecules that can be used as antibiotics and what we try to then do is see if we can design better forms, engineering design, more potent forms of those natural products. My teaching load has been relatively light as a new assistant professor. The university tries to give me a lot of time to build your research program. And so, I haven't spent too much time teaching but I am very excited to be running a course in the next quarter that's teaching chemistry and chemical engineering majors biochemistry lab techniques and so, they will actually work on experiments that are similar to the things we do in my laboratory and other biochemistry labs and I think that would be a very good experience for them as they're prepare to go out into the world whether be it graduate school or medical school to really have this hands-on lab experience, so I'm really looking forward to that.
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