rmoretti

I've been a post-doc with the Baker lab since early 2010, focusing on enzyme design. Specifically, my reasearch interests are on the methodology behind enzyme design and modeling protein small-molecule interactions, and how we can improve them. Although there's been some great successes in creating de novo enzymes, the activity of our designed enzymes is currently lower than we would like. I hope to find ways of improving our design methods to improve the rate and activity of our successful enzyme designs.

Background

I completed my Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under Profs. Aseem Ansari and Jon Thorson in December 2009. My thesis reaserch focused on using directed evolution techniques to alter the substrate specificity of sugar nucleotidyltransferase enzymes, as well as the design of small molecule artificial transcription factors.