Olga Boudker completed her undergraduate studies at Novosibirsk State University in the Russian Federation. She then received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute in Israel and the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.  During her Ph.D., Boudker focused on the thermodynamics of protein folding and conformational changes, working under the guidance of Ernesto Freire. After a brief postdoctoral period at MIT, she joined the lab of Eric Gouaux at Columbia University, where she started working on the structure and mechanism of glutamate transporters. In 2005, Boudker launched an independent research program at Weill Cornell Medicine, focusing on the structure, mechanism, evolution, and modulation of ion-coupled transporters. She rose through the ranks and is now a Professor and Acting Chair of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics. Among other awards, Dr. Boudker is a recipient of the Michael and Kate Bárány Award for Young Investigators from the Biophysical Society, the Cole Award from the Biophysical Society Membrane Subgroup, and the Javitz Neuroscience Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. She became an HHMI Investigator in 2015 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.

Adele Bubnys received a BA from Wesleyan University in 2014 with a double major in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and Neuroscience and Behavior. While there, she conducted research and wrote a senior thesis in the laboratory of Rich Olson, where she studied the role of membrane binding domains in vibrio cholerae cytolysin. Her thesis was awarded high honors and this research was published in the Journal of Biochemistry. Adele went on to earn a PhD in 2019 from the Rockefeller University in New York City, where she studied the role of hindbrain neurons in motor control and generalized behavioral arousal in the laboratory of Donald Pfaff. From there, she went on to do a postdoc in the lab of Li-Huei Tsai at MIT’s Picower Institute. In the Tsai lab, Adele led a team working to develop a neurovascular unit-in-a-dish using human patient-derived stem cells and used this to interrogate the role of neuroimmune interactions and the Alzheimer’s risk gene APOE4 in neurodegenerative disease. This work has led to a patent application and manuscript under review at Nature Biotechnology. Adele joined Arbor Biotechnologies as a Senior Scientist in late 2023, where she currently works on the lead validation team to develop and test crispr-based gene editing therapies targeting liver and CNS diseases.

Professor Thayer’s research interest is computational molecular biophysics applied to understanding biological molecules.  Recently her lab has developed two new techniques for studying signaling in proteins: Molecular Dynamics based Markov State Models and Molecular Dynamics based sector analysis and machine learning/AI.  Taken together, the methods identify the important residues in a molecule, and describe the energetic landscape of the system.  This information is being used to develop new therapeutic drugs for cancer working to target key residues in the molecule to restore native functionality to p53, a key protein implicated in human cancer. The methods hold promise to create new medicines for currently incurable diseases by virtue of tackling the problem from this new perspective.

Prof. Thayer received her Bachelor’s Degree from Regis College just outside of Boston, MA in 1999. She then completed her Ph.D. at Wesleyan University in computational chemistry in 2004. Subsequently she continued learning computational techniques in a series of postdocs at Northwestern University, University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  She held faculty positions at Vassar College, Assumption College, and Skidmore prior to joining the faculty at Wesleyan in 2016.

Professor Oriana Fisher 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.

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.

Professor Grace McKenzie-Smith uses high resolution imaging and machine learning to capture and quantify the behavior of freely moving insects such as fruit flies and ants. She is particularly interested in how social systems can make collective decisions based off of information held by only a few individuals. Grace completed her Ph.D. at Princeton University, and her B.A. at Bowdoin College.