Student Hosted Colloquia: Professor Katherine Franz, Duke University

Student Hosted Colloquia: Professor Katherine Franz, Duke University (Host: Matias Horst)

**This seminar is available for in-person attendance.**

"Infectiously Inorganic: A Metallocentric View of Antimicrobial Activity"

About the Seminar

Normal and pathogenic cells require a menu of metal nutrients for optimal growth, but also strategies to mitigate toxicity associated with misregulated or excessive levels of metals like Fe, Cu and Zn. Cells adjust metal homeostasis mechanisms depending on cell type, local growth conditions, and in response to stress. These situations present opportunities to manipulate cellular metals as a therapeutic strategy across a number of diseases. Here I will present a metallocentric view on utilizing small molecules and peptides that leverage unique metallobiology associated with bacterial and fungal infections to selectively inhibit growth of pathogenic microorganisms. More broadly, this approach is used to explore how cellular responses at the metallomic level affect and are affected by microbial susceptibility and adaptation to antimicrobial treatment.

About the Speaker

Katherine J. Franz is the Alexander F. Hehmeyer Professor and Chair of Chemistry at Duke University. As an undergraduate she conducted research with Prof. James Loehlin at Wellesley College and Dr. Richard Fish at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. She obtained her PhD in inorganic chemistry with Prof. Stephen J. Lippard at MIT, and completed an NIH postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Barbara Imperiali, also at MIT. Since 2003, Kathy and her research group at Duke have focused on elucidating the structural and functional consequences of metal ion coordination in biological systems, both by endogenous species and by synthetic molecules of their own design. They are particularly interested in understanding the coordination chemistry of essential yet toxic species like copper and iron, and using these principles to guide the development of new chemical tools to manipulate the location, speciation, and reactivity of metal ions in complex and dynamic environments like those found in biological systems. Kathy has received a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and a Bass Society Fellowship (Duke). Kathy is a member of the Editorial Board of Metallomics and recently received the ACS National Award for Encouraging Women in the Chemical Sciences.