-: Well, my name is Laura Dassama.
I am an assistant professor of chemistry
at Stanford University.
My lab works some things related to drug resistance,
so we try to understand new drug-resistance mechanisms
and we try to also work on the development
of new molecules
that we hope can some day be used
to treat wither drug-resistant bacteria or cancer.
We study a family of proteins,
lots of molecules and cells
that bacteria typically employ
when they encounter a new drug
and what these molecules do
is to just raid the drug from the bacteria cell,
so it essentially pumps it out
and we try to understand how those molecules
can recognize a wide variety of different drugs
and the hope then is that if we understand
how they do this, we can target them
for inhibition or degradation or something,
we can stop them for doing this recognition and efflux
and exporting of drugs.
We also like to make molecules.
I don't know if you currently hear
about the fact that we are not making new antibiotics
even though we're seeing an increased resistance
to all of the drugs we currently use
to treat bacterial infections
and so, my lab looks at how nature makes molecules
that can be used as antibiotics
and what we try to then do
is see if we can design better forms,
engineering design, more potent forms
of those natural products.
My teaching load has been relatively light
as a new assistant professor.
The university tries to give me a lot
of time to build your research program.
And so, I haven't spent too much time teaching
but I am very excited to be running a course
in the next quarter that's teaching chemistry
and chemical engineering majors biochemistry lab techniques
and so, they will actually work on experiments
that are similar to the things we do in my laboratory
and other biochemistry labs
and I think that would be a very good experience for them
as they're prepare to go out into the world
whether be it graduate school or medical school
to really have this hands-on lab experience,
so I'm really looking forward to that.