In precocious school, Cathy Drennan didn’t privation to survey chemistry. An inspiring chemistry prof astatine Vassar College changed her mind. Now, she is simply a prof of chemistry and biology astatine the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute prof and investigator.
Cathy Drennan
Drennan volition person the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology’s 2023 William C. Rose Award for her outstanding contributions to biochemical probe and committedness to grooming younger scientists.
Fresh retired of college, Drennan taught chemistry, biology, physics and play astatine Scattergood Friends School, a precocious schoolhouse successful West Branch, Iowa. Her theatrical acquisition became utile successful the subject classroom, wherever she recovered that being enthusiastic and sometimes implicit the apical helped students learn.
Defying the stereotype of a superior professor, she wears themed outfits inspired by each lecture topic.
“Science is fun,” she said. “Why are we not making this wide to people?”
Many students conflict to find relation models successful textbooks. That’s wherefore Drennan likes to supply her students with examples of chemists from divers backgrounds.
The assemblage needs to item much scientists with disabilities, she said. As idiosyncratic who has dyslexia and was told she wouldn’t postgraduate from precocious school, she has go a relation exemplary for others with disabilities. Many students with dyslexia and their parents and teachers person reached retired to her for advice, disquieted that it volition beryllium excessively hard to prosecute a subject vocation with a disability. Often, she said, “they’re the ones doing the champion enactment successful a originative mode due to the fact that their encephalon is moving differently.”
For Drennan, having radical who believed successful her made a immense difference. Now, she is paying it forward. In a missive recommending her for the Rose award, her erstwhile postgraduate pupil Lindsey Backman wrote, “She sees people’s highest potential, and past she reassures them of their capabilities and brings retired the champion successful them.”
Form equals function
When Cathy Drennan was being interviewed by postgraduate schools, it rapidly became wide that she had a caput for structural biology. As she spoke with professors astir their research, she said, she kept returning to the aforesaid question: “How tin you recognize thing if you don’t cognize what it looks like?
“Once I figured retired that you could get the structural information, I was wholly hooked.”
This devotion has led Drennan to lick galore long-awaited macromolecule structures utilizing X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy. Her probe chiefly focuses connected metalloenzymes, enzymes that usage metallic cofactors to catalyze chemic reactions.
Early on, Drennan solved the archetypal operation of a vitamin B12–dependent ribonucleotide reductase, a metalloenzyme that converts the gathering blocks of RNA into the gathering blocks of DNA. While she has solved structures of galore different proteins, these captious enzymes person remained a long-standing taxable of her research.
Recently, Drennan obtained the archetypal snapshot of a ribonucleotide reductase successful an progressive state, a groundbreaking feat that revealed however electrons determination done the enzyme. Just arsenic she’s ever recognized, she had to spot the enzyme’s signifier earlier she could recognize its function.
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