My favorite part of this job is when I get to interact with researchers, through hands-on training and project consulting. My passion in science is visualizing dynamic molecular structures and functions in their physiological context.
I love living in Santa Cruz, a laid-back, small beach town with a warm microclimate, at the intersection of the Pacific Ocean, redwood forests, and of course, an excellent public university. I am the parent of a fur baby named Buddy and am the cool aunt to two Seattleite nephews. I enjoy arts, reading, gardening, hiking, sailing, and camping.
List of publications here.
Past experience highlights:
2019 – 2020
Assistant research professor of Integrative Physiology and Neuroscience at Washington State U.
- Training, coordinating, and equipment maintenance of a super-resolution and confocal microscopy suite plus shared biochemical and animal resources throughout the Veterinary and Biomedical Research Building.
- Taught a graduate course on microscopy.
2014 – 2018
IRTA post-doc fellow in the Systems Biology Center of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Inst, NIH.
- Mapped protein-protein interactions by crosslinking mass-spectrometry, providing evidence for supercomplexes in intact mitochondria from mouse heart – presented at the EBEC meeting in Italy in 2016 and published in Mol Cell Proteomics.
- Created and ran a Bioenergetics journal club called "Your Biochemistry Textbook is Wrong!"
2013 – 2014
Post-doc fellow in the Center for Developmental Therapeutics at Seattle Children's Research Inst and U of Washington.
- Fellowship from the Northwest Mitochondrial Research Guild for studying a longevity-enhancing glutathione S-transferase knockdown in a C. elegans model of primary mitochondrial disease.
- First prize for talk at the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation meeting.
- Methods development for bioenergetics of live C. elegans by Seahorse assays in Nature Protocols.
2006 – 2013
PhD grad student of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences at Johns Hopkins U School of Medicine.
- Measured a FRET reporter of histone acetyltransferase activity in live mammalian cells in response to drug treatment – cover article in ChemBioChem and also wrote for Chemical Reviews.
- Course Director and Lecturer for science communication graduate course and teaching assistant for microscopy graduate course.
2002 – 2006
Undergrad student of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Lewis & Clark College.
- Honors thesis involving genetic cloning and microscopy of lysosome-related organelles in C. elegans published in Genetics.
- Neely Scholar (full ride, 4 year scholarship).
2004: Volunteer doctors' assistant at Livingstone Hospital in South Africa.
2002, 2003: Marketing and financial analyst for Boston Scientific, Asia Pacific headquarters in Singapore.
2000 – 2002: Singapore American School
- Graduated high school as Salutatorian and Artist of the Year
See CV here.
eRA Commons ID: BRABBITT
ORCID: 0000-0002- 0896-6024