Keya Jonnalagadda, UC Santa Cruz, Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology    

Margaret Kenney, UC Berkeley, Political Science

 Katarina (Katie) Michel, UC Davis, Geography    

 Cody Mowery, UC San Francisco, MD/Ph.D. Immunology (Norall award)

 Brittany Peterson, UC San Francisco, Epidemiology   

 Robert Shepherd, UC Santa Cruz, Chemistry (Hendess award)  

Many of the drugs we use today found their origins in nature. Penicillin, a widely used antibiotic, was first discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming from the fungus “Penicillium notatum”, later sparking the golden era of antibiotic discovery (~1940-1962). Today, antibiotic resistance has become a major threat, presenting a need to find therapeutics with novel mechanisms of action. As we continue to look to nature to uncover molecules with unparalleled structural diversity, we have yet to overcome the ongoing antibiotic discovery plateau. Many traditional methods used to discover unknown chemical compounds from nature continue to result in the rediscovery of known compounds. My research aims to harness novel analytical technologies, namely high-throughput mass spectrometry and ion mobility spectrometry, to enhance drug discovery and drug design efforts. My goal is to design analytical workflows that can be applied across a variety of experimental scenarios, ranging from enzyme engineering to more traditional drug discovery approaches, with an emphasis on increasing screening volume, and streamlining data analysis.

 Sophia Simon, UC Davis, Ecology

 Charlotte Wang, UC San Francisco, Biomedical Sciences (Reed award)