Biography
I grew up on Orwell Hill in Bradford County, Pennsylvania (rural Northeast). with my parents, J.B. and Judy Russell. I attended Northeast Bradford Schools for elementary school and junior/senior high school. I was involved in activities like our 4-H dairy program, student government, and many musical groups (I sang and played piano and clarinet).
For college, I moved about two hours west to upstate New York (the village of Alfred), to attend college at Alfred University, where I majored in chemistry and minored in math. I did undergraduate research under the direction of Johanna Crane (now at University of Puget Sound). We were working on the synthesis of new, low carbon content metallopolymers that could undergo chemical vapor deposition to produce high quality metal oxide materials. While a student at Alfred, I was also very involved in the performing arts (Chamber Singers, AU Choir, AU band, a production of The Mikado, as well as piano lessons while accompanying the Chamber Singers and voice lessons culminating in a half recital my senior year). I was also an advocate with the Sexual Assault Victims' Advocacy Program and an active member (and chapter president) of the local student affiliates chapter of the American Chemical Society.
After graduation, I moved north to Rochester, NY to attend graduate school in chemistry at the University of Rochester. There, I completed my Ph.D. under the guidance of Kara Bren. In the Bren lab, my first project was an NMR study of cytochrome c folding; we took advantage of the special NMR properties of the paramagnetic form of the protein to monitor the populations of several protein conformations under unfolding and partially unfolding conditions. My second project was an NMR study of the nanosecond to millisecond time-scale dynamics of cytochrome c. We were comparing my protein (from a bacterium that thrives in moderate temperatures, ~37 C) with another protein from a bacterium found in hot springs (~70 C), looking for the relationship between protein dynamics and stability at different temperatures. While I lived in Rochester, I was a member of the Rochester Oratorio Society, with whom I did a number of fantastic concerts, including concerts with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, our annual candlelight Messiah concert, and the fabulous Carmina Burana at the Chautauqua Institution in conjunction with the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus, the Chautauqua Sympony Orchestra, the Chautauqua Ballet Company, and a Chautauqua Children's Choir.
I then made a much bigger move to the midwest for a postdoc with Yi Lu in the chemistry department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. In the Lu lab, I divided my time between teaching the Chemistry and Biology of Everyday Life and my research in protein engineering. The course was an innovative plug-in to college science teaching, funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. We introduced students majoring in chemistry, biology, and related fields to opportunities for doing research in one of the many labs at the University of Illinois, and also taught them many of the tools they would need for research (besides experimental technique). The most fun part of the class was taking students on trips to tour industrial laboratories and to go to national science conferences. In my protein engineering research, we were re-engineering myoglobin (by introducing new metal-binding sites) to have different reactivity toward oxygen and nitric oxide. Our re-engineered myoglobin could then act as a model system for understanding much more complicated proteins, such as cytochrome c oxidase and nitric oxide reductase. I used some of my NMR skills from graduate school to provide some structural insight into our model system, and picked up a number of new skills including EPR and spectroelectrochemistry.
Through these experiences and more, I have learned that I love doing research. I am fascinated by the interactions of metals and proteins, but I also really enjoy the intellectual stimulation of working with other people on a project. I also enjoy teaching and working with college students, so a career at a place like Gustavus just made sense.