Three New Faculty Join Department of Chemistry
It is with great pleasure that the Department of Chemistry welcomes three new Assistant Professors to our faculty.
Professor Doerrer is a synthetic inorganic chemist. She received her Ph.D. in 1996 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with Professor Stephen Lippard. She was appointed a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow from 1996 to 1997 in the laboratory of Malcolm Green at Oxford University, followed by a Junior Research Fellowship with him from 1997 to 1999. Linda joined the faculty of Barnard College in 1999 and developed a research program that earned her awards from the National Science Foundation, the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, the Petroleum Research Fund, among others. In 2002 Barnard recognized her teaching excellence by giving her the Emily Gregory Award for Excellence in Teaching and Service. Linda’s current research interests include synthetic inorganic and organometallic solution phase molecules; perfluorinated aryl rings in weakly coordinated anions, and metallophilic interactions with precious metal double salts.
Professor Xia is joint faculty member in the Boston University Bioinformatics Program and the Department of Chemistry. He received his Ph.D. in 2003 from Stanford University, working with Professor Michael Levitt. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University from 2003-2006 with Professor Mark Gerstein. He has been awarded fellowships from both the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research (2004-2006) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (1996-2001). Brandon’s research interest is the application of computational techniques to study the structure, function, and evolution of complex bio-molecular systems, such as proteins and protein networks. Specific projects include: reconstruction of protein interaction and regulatory networks by genomic data integration; comparative and evolutionary analysis of proteins and protein networks; protein sequence-structure-function relationships; prediction of protein structure and function,
Professor Reinhard is a physical chemist. He received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern working with Professor Gereon Niedner-Schatteburg. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow from 2004-2006 with Professor Jan Liphardt at UC, Berkeley. He is a recipient of the Juan de la Cierva Award (2006) and a DFG Research Scholarship (2005). Björn’s interests are the design, implementation, and characterization of new tools for imaging and manipulation of “hard” (inorganic) and “soft” (biological) materials. One of his aims is to produce hybrid materials that combine interesting electronic/optical properties of inorganic materials with the structural properties of biological materials. He is currently also developing new probes and sensing schemes to characterize the function and dynamics of individual biological molecules and complexes. The ultimate goal of these studies is to generate reliable tools that can grant insight into fundamental biological processes on a single molecule level.