Nancy Monson

Nancy Monson will be working in the lab during the summer session of 2007 and again in the summer of 2008.  Her work here is supported by the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust Foundation’s “Partners in Science Program.”  This program makes it possible for high school science teachers to gain real research experience in a laboratory or field setting.  Nancy graduated from UC Santa Barbara (B.S. Biology) and earned her teaching credential (and M.A. in Education) from Stanford University.  She has taught high school science for the past 14 years (the last 2 years at Sunset High School in Beaverton) and will be joining the science department at West Linn High School this fall.  In her teaching career, she has taught a variety of classes, including:  Honors Chemistry, Honors Biology, Honors Physics, International Baccalaureate (IB) Biology (a 2-year advanced level biology class), and Anatomy/Physiology.  Her project for summer 2007 is “Mechanistic Studies of a Novel GTP Cyclohydrolase I Enzyme from Pathogenic Bacteria.”

Two of her favorite people are her dogs, Bubba (8) and Austin (7).

  

group news

June 2007: Welcome to Nancy Monson and Tamsen Polly. Nancy is a high-school teacher from Sunset HS (Beaverton) who will spend the next two summers in the lab on a Partners in Science grant from the M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust.  Tamsen Polly is a high school student from Sherwood HS who will spend the summer in the lab as an intern through the Apprenticeship in Science and Engineering program (ASE) of Saturday Academy.

May 2007. Congratulations to Steven Van Lanen (Ph.D. ’03), who just accepted a position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky.  Steve is finishing up a very productive post-doc with Professor Ben Shen at the University of Wisconsin and will start his new position at Kentucky in December.

May 2007: Welcome to Nathalie Safraoui, who joins the lab for the summer as an International Visiting Scholar after completing her studies at Université Paris-Sud, in Orsay, France.

May 2007: Congratulations to Rowaida Al-Eryani on her successful M.S. thesis defense!  She’s headed to UT Southwestern to work as a research assistant in the lab of Professor Haydn Ball.

May 2007. Congratulations to Bobby Lee on his successful Ph.D. dissertation defense!  He’s off to a post-doc in Professor Sunny Zhou’s lab at the Barnett Institute at Northeastern University.

March 2007. The lab was awarded a new grant from NASA!! This project focuses on the potential role of archaeosine in the structural stability of archaeal tRNA.

October 30th, 2006. QuZyme, LLC is a winner of the NSF-sponsored Lab2Market technology disclosure competition for work to develop the nitrile reductase QueF as an industrial biocatalyst.

October 2006. Congratulations to Vimbai Masiyanise for passing her comprehensive exams on the first try and a year ahead of schedule!

June, 2006.  QuZyme, LLC is awarded a phase I SBIR from the NIH to investigate the feasibility of engineering the nitrile reductase QueF for use as an industrial biocatalyst.
        2007 Iwata-Reuyl Lab