The Big Picture

I study how life interacts with heat

When you’re sick with a fever, how does your elevated temperature change the ways your body responds and recovers? Infectious fever is one of many settings in which heat dictates how cellular life behaves, down to the individual molecules that make up cells. I use specialized microscopy (Squires Lab) and biochemistry (Drummond Lab) to investigate how cellular life transduces heat into biological responses at the molecular level. My work targets two systems of interest: (1) baker’s yeast as a well-studied model organism for heat shock, and (2) human immune cell lines as they encounter fever temperature and infectious stimuli.