Biochemistry graduate student Alexandra Turmon (Backus group) has been awarded a prestigious Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Individual Predoctoral Fellowship (NIH F31).
The NIH F31 award, formally known as the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award for Individual Predoctoral Fellows, is a prestigious grant awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It aims to support promising predoctoral students in their research endeavors, providing them with the necessary resources to pursue advanced training in biomedical, behavioral, or clinical research.
Working with her mentor, Professor Keriann Backus, Turmon’s research focuses on the development and application of chemoproteomic methods to identify proteome wide changes in biological systems that could later be leveraged as therapeutic targets.
Turmon is a third year Biochemistry, Molecular and Structural Biology (BMSB) graduate student. She received her B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she researched cyclic peptides and the tunability of their drug-like properties to target protein-protein interactions in the lab of Professor Scott Lokey.
At UCLA, Turmon’s research is focused on the intersection of chemoproteomic and proteogenomic methodologies to uncover druggable targets within the proteome. Recently, there has been interest in unifying transcriptomic and proteomic datasets to holistically study drivers of diseases which have been historically deemed “undruggable”. This approach is especially powerful in application to diseases arising from genetic mutations, as is the case for chromosome 3 rearranged myeloid leukemias. Alexandra’s research is focused on the development and application of N-terminal chemoproteomic tools to uncover the therapeutic vulnerabilities of these leukemias that have remained obscured by discrepancies between in vitro experiments and patient treatment. Ultimately, these findings will highlight potential pathways critical to modeling in vivo cell biology in vitro, as well as indicate potential targets for future drug development.
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.
