YSIG Spotlight Series No.1: September 22, 2022

Over the course of an hour featured speakers will have the opportunity to share information about their research and engage in discussion with the audience.  

Nathaniel Barker | Northwestern University

Nathaniel (Nate) Barker attended Wheeling Jesuit University where he obtained a B.S. in Chemistry. His studies then took him to the University of Cincinnati working under Dr. William Connick and Dr. Peng Zhang. He focused on developing and characterizing Platinum-based vapochromic sensors and investigating polymorphic platinum salts via X-ray Crystallography.

After completing his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry (2021), he started his current position at Northwestern University as a postdoctoral fellow at the Integrated Molecular Structure Education and Research Center (IMSERC). At IMSERC he assists in daily operations, specialty experiments, and training of users for X-ray diffraction experiments, as well as thermal analysis, X-ray fluorescence, polarimetry, and FT-IR experiments.

Jadon Blount | Western Washington University

Jadon Blount is a recent graduate of Western Washington University who is pursuing a career in computational biochemistry and is currently spending a post-bachelor year in Dr. Jeanine Amacher's lab studying sortase enzymes using computational molecular modeling tools. By utilizing computational structural modeling, Jadon is able to discover and characterize unique mechanisms and interactions that often remain elusive in conventional chemistry and structural biology.