Brief Self Biography – I grew up, mainly, in Boulder, Colorado and did all of my primary education there. My mother is a chemist, my father a computational meteorologist, and my older sister a biochemist – each has had an important role in my education. I was fortunate to be mentored in biochemistry from a young age and worked at the University of Colorado for many years to conduct experiments for annual Science Fair Competitions. I completed an undergraduate degree in Molecular and Cell Biology with a second major in French and an Honors Thesis in the Humanistic Studies, at The Johns Hopkins University, in 2004. I spent the next two years teaching at CU-Boulder in the Cell Biology and Chemistry Departments; I am also an Organic Chemistry instructor for the Princeton Review. I am now in Albuquerque with my significant other, Geoffrey, an architect, and our beautiful Australian Shepherd, Gypsy; I am in the Biomedical Sciences PhD program at the School of Medicine and have joined the lab of Dr.s Bridget Wilson, Diane Lidke, and Janet Oliver in the Department of Pathology. I am an avid ultimate frisbee player and also enjoy hiking, mountain climbing, tennis, reading, and cooking.
Research/Research Interests Description– We are interested in the dynamics of proteins in the plasma membrane with an emphasis on spatial arrangements, temporal reorganization and the effects that these phenomena have on signal transduction. The ErbB, or Her, family of receptor tyrosine kinases requires dimerization to initiate signaling. It is essential, in our studies, to avoid artificial crosslinking of these proteins by bivalent antibodies. So, we are developing monovalent Fab nanoprobes for all future work. We are conjugating these Fab fragments to quantum dots (QDs) using an NHS ester. Specificity of the QD-Fab must be substantiated to assert that our probe does not impair normal function of the receptor. We will use multi-color single particle tracking to examine receptor dynamics with respect to the plasma membrane and other integral proteins. Ultimately, we plan to prepare Fab-quantum dot probes specific to each of the four ErbB family members. These nanoparticles will serve as important tools in studying ErbB receptor dynamics. This approach is expected to yield useful information about the diffusional properties of ErbB receptors and permit modeling of receptor dynamics using realistic properties and parameters. Ultimately, this work could have important implications for certain human cancers in which ErbB proteins are overexpressed or misregulated.
From: D.J. Arndt-Jovin, D.S. Lidke, KA. Lidke, B. Rieger, and T.M. Jovin, Quantum dots shed light on processes in living cells. SPIE, 2006.