Deborah Perlstein joins Chemistry Faculty
Professor Deborah Perlstein, an enzymologist whose research is at the interface of biology and chemistry, has joined the Department (July 2010).
As a Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Professor Suzanne Walker at the Harvard Medical School (2006-2010), she studied the sugar polymerases that build the bacterial cell wall. This work, which was recently featured in Nature Chemical Biology (Research Highlights, February 2010), serves as the foundation for her independent research which will focus on understanding how bacterial cytoskeletal proteins coordinate the activities of cell wall forming and degrading enzymes during bacterial growth and division. Inhibitors of this process could be developed into new antibacterial agents.
She also plans to initiate a project investigating the biochemical pathway for iron sulfur cluster assembly and the unique reactivity of iron-containing proteins, a topic that has intrigued her since she was a graduate student in Professor JoAnne Stubbe’s laboratory at MIT. Prof. Perlstein was a recipient of an NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship (2006-2009), an NIH Predoctoral Traineeship (2002-2004) and a Merck/MIT Predoctoral Fellowship (1999-2001).