QCRG

QCRG Team

David Agard, PhD, is focused on trying to understand the molecular basis of how complex machinery in the cell functions. His particular take on it is to try to resolve the atomic structures of key molecules and to figure out how they work from that, while also looking at where they go wrong in disease. 

Charles Craik, PhD, uses chemistry to answer important biological questions at the interface between biology, medicine and pharmacy. He identifies the roles and regulates the activity of proteases associated with infectious diseases, cancer and development.

James Fraser, PhD, looks at proteins, macromolecules within cells, and tries to determine what structures they take on, what their shapes are and how they move between structures as they execute their functions within cells to quantify how these perturbations impact protein function and organismal fitness. 

Danica Fujimori, PhD, works on the identification of new potential drug targets to determine the context in which proteins can serve as drug targets, and to identify small molecules that could act to stop pathogenic proteins from acting in ways to cause disease. 

Jason Gestwicki, PhDis interested in molecular chaperones, protein homeostasis and protein misfolding disorders. To approach the big questions in this area, he uses a chemical biology strategy that includes the discovery and optimization of new chemical inhibitors to acutely perturb chaperone functions, revealing how these systems normally protect from cancer and neurodegeneration as well as other diseases. 

John Gross, PhD, investigates molecular machines that coordinate gene expression or antiviral immunity. His research areas include RNA decay enzymes that act in mRNA quality control and gene regulatory pathways, and nucleic acid based immune systems that protect animals from viruses and neutralization of these systems by viral accessory proteins.

Matthew Jacobson, PhD, focuses on developing new computational methods for drug discovery, as well as general tools that can be applied to almost every area of drug discovery. His software is used by essentially all of the major pharmaceutical companies.

Natalia Jura, PhD, researches what regulates growth signals in a cell and looks at how cells grow under normal situations when they are healthy, and then what goes wrong during diseases. She looks at the molecular machines, the proteins themselves, and how they change in response to the binding of ligands.

Tanja Kortemme, PhD, develops methods to engineer biological molecules, proteins that have new biological functions. She does so by developing computational algorithms that help create detailed models of these proteins so that they can be designed at atom-level detail.

Nevan Krogan, PhD, focuses on developing tools that allows one to globally study the function of genes and proteins and how they work together, and targets genes that are in many disease areas in an effort to help find new therapies for diseases.

Aashish Manglik, PhD, seeks to understand how cells sense and respond to their external environment. In this endeavor, his lab studies the numerous proteins that lie at the cellular surface that enable individual cells to decipher the enormous number of stimuli that coordinate normal physiology. To gain a fundamental understanding of such transmembrane signaling processes, they use a diverse array of techniques spanning biochemical and biophysical interrogation to protein engineering. Their ultimate goal is to use these insights to discover new approaches to precisely control cellular signaling.

Shaeri Mukherjee, PhD, elucidates how intracellular bacterial pathogens manipulate Rab function to promote their virulence and to uncover fundamental principles of membrane traffic. To accomplish this, she utilizes the intracellular pathogen Legionella pneumophila as a model, which in turn can be applied to other disease states.

Geeta Narlikar, PhD, studies chromatin and the many processes involved in its regulation. She is an expert in the fields of epigenetic regulation and genome organization, and studies how the folding and compartmentalization of our genome is regulated to generate the many cell types that make up our body.

Melanie Ott, MD, PhD, is interested in the molecular mechanisms of viral pathogenesis. She focuses on HIV-1 and Hepatitis C Virus (HCV). Both are important public health problems and share common traits including high propensities to establish chronic infections and a lack of efficient vaccines. Her HIV efforts focus on viral transcription and latency as remaining barriers to viral eradication.

Oren Rosenberg, MD, PhD, studies and treats infectious diseases. His goal is to discover and exploit molecular vulnerabilities in bacteria in order to design faster, cheaper, less toxic and more effective therapeutics to treat life-threatening infections.

Davide Ruggero, PhD, works on understanding the molecular mechanisms by which impairments in accurate control of mRNA translation, cell growth, and overall cellular protein synthesis rates lead to human disease and cancer.

Andrej Sali, PhD, is interested in describing structures of proteins and their complexes, how the systems work, and how we can modulate their functions with other molecules. He uses information that comes from different experimental methods, computation methods and statistical analyses.

Brian Shoichet, PhD, researches the discovery of new molecules to modulate drug targets, and trying to de-orphanize receptors in the body. He tries to discover molecules that will inform the use of receptors with currently unknown functions.

Kevan Shokat, PhD, seeks to uncover fundamental principles of cell signaling that require the development of new chemical tools. He tries to find new drugs that treat different kinds of diseases, like cancer and neurodegeneration, and viral infections.

Robert Stroud, MA, PhD, studies the molecular basis of biological function. He is particularly interested in transporters that transport nutrients across the membranes of biological cells to incorporate essential nutrients, and transporters that are co-opted to eliminate drugs and thus provide for drug resistance.

Jack Taunton, PhD, develops small molecules to try to understand how cells work and how to intervene in various disease processes, such as cancer and autoimmune disease.

Kliment Verba, PhD, is a QBI Fellow who specializes in structurally analyzing protein complexes using CryoEM. He focuses on understanding how proteins accomplish their work, by first understanding their molecular structure.

Jim Wells, PhD, is interested in how cells change in cancers, such as pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer and blood borne cancers, and how they can be treated with antibodies. His antibodies are then cross-referenced in various disease states.