Fourth-year BMSB PhD student Colleen Hui from Merchant lab has been selected as a Graduate Scholar at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
Funded by LLNL, the Livermore Graduate Scholar Program allows participants to gain hands-on experience with the cutting-edge instruments available at LLNL, and to apply them toward solving problems in the context of questions that are addressed in their dissertation research. For the next two to three years, Hui will be working jointly with LLNL staff physicist Dr. Peter Weber and microbiologist/senior scientist Dr. Jennifer Pett-Ridge, as well as other members of Professor Sabeeha Merchant’s laboratory, to understand iron homeostasis in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Specifically, Hui will be using LLNL’s unique nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry (nanoSIMS) capability to distinguish the iron storage site in Chlamydomonas cells, and to analyze the dynamics of intracellular iron movement. The outcome of this project will provide a better understanding on trace metal utilization in a reference organism for increasing global primary productivity and sustainable bioproducts and biofuel production.
Hui received bachelor’s degrees in Latin and Chemical Biology from UC Berkeley in 2013. In 2016, she received her master’s degree in Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology from the Oregon Health and Science University. Hui joined the UCLA Biochemistry, Molecular and Structural Biology (BMSB) graduate program in 2016 working with Merchant who currently holds faculty appointments at both UC Berkeley and UCLA.
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.
