The Fisher lab investigates how bacteria respond and adapt to changes in their environments. We use a variety of complementary approaches spanning X-ray crystallography, bioinorganic chemistry, biochemistry, biophysics, and microbiology to investigate metal usage and enzyme mechanisms. Our longer-term goals are to harness our findings to develop novel treatments for bacterial infections.

Oriana double majored in Biochemistry and English at Brandeis University, where her interest in structural biology was sparked while working in Prof. Greg Petsko and Prof. Dagmar Ringe’s joint laboratory. After graduating from Brandeis, she went on to receive her PhD from Yale University. As a graduate student, she worked in Prof. Titus Boggon’s laboratory where she studied the structure and function of cerebral cavernous malformations 2 (CCM2), a protein in which mutations have been implicated in neurovascular disease. She subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University, where she worked in Prof. Amy Rosenzweig’s laboratory studying copper-dependent proteins produced by methane-oxidizing bacteria. Before coming to Wesleyan, she was on the faculty of the chemistry department at Lehigh University.