Graeme Conn, PhD
Professor
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Graeme received his B.Sc. and Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and followed this with postdoctoral research as a Wellcome Trust International Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. Graeme was a faculty member at UMIST/The University of Manchester, UK, from 2000 and joined the Department of Biochemistry at Emory in 2008.
Dr. Conn's School of Medicine Faculty Profile
Debayan Dey, PhD
Instructor
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Debayan received his Bachelors degree in Physics and Masters degree in Biophysics from Calcutta University, India. He received his Ph.D. in Crystallography and Structural biology from Physics Department of Indian Institute of Science in 2016. After a short postdoctoral work at Indian Institute of Science and Poornaprajna Institute of Scientific Research, India, he joined the Conn lab in June 2017. Deb was supported by a Cystic Fibrosis Foundation postdoctoral fellowship for his work on the P. aeruginosa lysine trimethyltransferase EftM and is continuing this work in parallel with studies of antibiotic resistance arising through rRNA methylation and drug efflux.
Enoch Ayamga
Graduate Student, BCDB Program
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Mohamed Barmada
Graduate Student, BCDB Program
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Mohamed received his Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and Master’s in Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021. He joined the Biochemistry, Cell & Developmental Biology Graduate Program at Emory in Fall 2022 and later joined the Conn Lab in March 2023. He is currently working on characterizing the properties and functions of ribosomal methyltransferases associated with antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
Logan Kavanaugh
Graduate Student, MMG Program
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Logan received her Bachelor’s and Master’s of Science in Biology with a specialization in Microbiology and Bioinformatics from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She joined the Microbiology and Molecular Genetics (MMG) Program at Emory University in Fall 2019. Logan’s research interests include evolution of antibiotic resistance and therapeutic development. She joined the Conn Lab in March 2020 where her NIH/ NIGMS F31-supported thesis research will focus on the discrimination between substrates and non-substrates by efflux pumps that contribute to antibiotic resistance in gram-negative bacteria.
Suparno Nandi, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
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Suparno received his M.Sc. in Biotechnology from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, India, in 2013. After working as a research fellow at the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, he joined the Chemistry graduate program at the University of Iowa in 2015. He earned his Ph.D. in 2020 and then joined the Conn lab in 2021 as a postdoctoral fellow, where his goal is to understand the antibiotic resistance mechanism of rRNA methyltransferase enzymes.
Alejandro Oviedo
Graduate Student, BCDB Program
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Alejandro received his Bachelor’s and Master’s of Science in Biochemistry from Texas State University and was part of the South Texas Doctoral Bridge Program. He joined the Biochemistry, Cell and Developmental Biology Program at Emory University in Fall 2020 and was awarded an IMSD Fellowship. Alejandro is interested in structural biology and biochemistry. He joined the Conn lab in May 2021 where his thesis research will focus on the molecular mechanism of OAS1 activation by the cellular non-coding (nc)RNA, nc886.
Sarah Strassler
Graduate Student, BCDB Program
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Sarah received her Bachelors degree in Chemistry from University of Florida in 2014. After spending three years teaching high school science as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ghana, she joined the BCDB program at Emory in Fall 2018. Sarah joined the Conn lab in April 2019 where her thesis research will focus on characterizing the mechanism of substrate recognition for the tRNA methyltransferase Trm10. Sarah is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and an ARCS Scholarship.
Natalia Zelinskaya, PhD
Associate Scientist
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Natalia received her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology at Moscow State University, Russia. She continued as a research scientist at the Institute of Protein Research, Pushchino, Russia, Natalia and was a Royal Society visiting researcher at the University of Reading, UK, and Royal Society/ NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Sheffield, UK. In 2008 Natalia became the first Conn lab member at Emory. Her research focuses on antibiotic-resistance rRNA methyltransferases.