We're thrilled to announce that Dr. Alan Culbertson is joining us as Assistant Professor! 

Al grew up just west of Detroit and studied plant biology and biochemistry at Michigan State University and worked on generating a protocol for fungal expression of plant cell wall degrading enzymes during his undergraduate research. He then wanted to study the biosynthesis of plant cell wall polysaccharides and pursued this in Dr. Olga Zabotina’s lab at Iowa State University for his graduate studies. In Dr. Zabotina’s lab, among several of his projects was solving the crystal structure of Xyloglucan Xylosyltransferase 1 which revealed several unanswered questions about its mode of action. Following his graduate work, Al moved to Boston for his postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School working on human ABC transporters utilizing cryo-electron microscopy (cryoEM). He then briefly worked at a pharmaceutical company in Boston called Roivant Discovery where he was a structural biologist using both x-ray crystallography and cryoEM to study several of their therapeutic targets. He is now merging his past experiences in starting his own research laboratory at Iowa State University in studying plant ABC transporters using cryoEM along with other in vitro biochemical assays. 

Find out more about Dr. Culberston here.

The Department looks forward to welcoming (back) Dr. Culbertson and our new Teaching Lab Coordinator, Nick Crumpton, at an ISU Creamery ice cream social later this month.