Single-molecule Measurements of DNA Topology and Topoisomerases

Current position: Tenure-track investigator at the Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health

Education: Ph.D. in physics (biophysics) in 2002 from Princeton University

Nonscientific interests: Hiking, cycling and two children

During the final year of my undergraduate degree in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, I attended a lecture by Steven Block on optical trapping and single-molecule biophysics. His talk inspired me to switch from atomic physics to biophysics, and I had the good fortune to be accepted as a graduate student into his group at Princeton University. My thesis focused on single-molecule measurements of transcription by RNA polymerase using optical tweezers. I became fascinated by the topological aspects of transcription and by DNA topology, which led me to pursue postdoctoral research in the lab of David Bensimon and Vincent Croquette at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, a lab that pioneered magnetic tweezers and single-molecule measurements of DNA topology and topoisomerases. In that lab, I used magnetic tweezers to study the mechanisms of chiral topology discrimination by a bacterial type II topoisomerase. I started my lab at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health in 2007, and I continue to work on single-molecule measurements of DNA topology and topoisomerases.