The following are among the new faculty members at the University. Others will be introduced periodically in this space.
Eric Galburt, Ph.D., joins the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at the School of Medicine as assistant professor. Galburt was most recently a visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems and of Cellular Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned a doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Washington and a bachelor’s degree in physics at Brown University. His research interests include single molecule biophysics, optical trapping, magnetic trapping, DNA transcription and RNA splicing.
James Janetka, Ph.D., joins the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at the School of Medicine as research assistant professor. Most recently, he was principal scientist in medicinal chemistry at AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, where he contributed to and directed several projects aimed at developing novel cancer therapeutics. Prior to AstraZeneca, he worked for Vertex Pharmaceuticals as a staff investigator in medicinal chemistry, working on inhibitors targeting Hepatitis C, cancer and arthritis. Janetka was a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Institutes of Health. He earned a doctorate in organic chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.His research interests include the design and chemical synthesis of novel compounds, structure-based inhibitor design, medicinal chemistry and novel cancer therapeutics.
Ana Ruiz Manzano, Ph.D., joins the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at the School of Medicine as research assistant professor. Ruiz Manzano was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute’s Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics Department in Dresden, Germany. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. She also did postdoctoral research at the Hospital Ramon y Cajal in Madrid. She earned a doctorate in biochemistry at Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia in Madrid and a bachelor’s degree in biology sciences at Basque Country University. She has received the Alexander von Humbolt Research Fellowship and three fellowships from the Basque government. Her research interests include RNA cotranscriptional splicing and transcription elongation.