Research

In general, my research concerns metabolism -- the set of reactions by which cells extract what they need (chemical energy and compounds used for growth and repair) from what they have (raw materials or "food"). As an undergraduate, I characterized an individual enzyme (sphinganine kinase) in plant cells; as a graduate student, I analyzed fluxes through entire pathways (glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation) in skeletal muscle cells; and in my initial postdoctoral work, I investigated how alterations at particular enzymatic steps lead to flux changes at the whole-pathway level in methylotrophic bacteria.

I'm now starting a new project on the use of drugs to disrupt metabolism in protozoan parasites such as Leishmania, Plasmodium, Trypanosoma brucei, and Trypanosoma cruzii, the respective causes of leishmaniasis, malaria, African sleeping sickness, and Chagas' disease. As part of this project, I help maintain TDRtargets.org, an online database that will expedite the development of new drugs.