New faculty focus: New faces in Biochemistry Department
Biochemistry is in the midst of adding four new faculty members. Robert Kirchdoerfer and Tim Grant will work with the university’s new cryo-electron microscopy facility to study viruses and technology development, while Scott Coyle and Amy Weeks will study the inner workings of the cell.
Scott Coyle and Amy Weeks
Coyle
Weeks
Scott Coyle and Amy Weeks joined the Department of Biochemistry in September 2019. Coyle joins the department from a postdoctoral position at Stanford University and scientific consultant for a company he co-founded called CellDesignLabs. Before coming to UW–Madison, Weeks was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Francisco.
Tim Grant
Grant
Tim Grant will be a virology investigator for the Morgridge Institute for Research and an assistant professor of biochemistry at UW–Madison when he comes to Madison in early 2020. Grant’s first exposure to cryo-EM was in the early 2000s, as an undergraduate at Imperial College in London. Grant was drawn to the technology’s unique marriage of biology and computing.
Robert Kirchdoerfer
Kirchdoerfer
When Robert Kirchdoerfer was offered a faculty position in the Department of Biochemistry and the Institute for Molecular Virology, it was a bit of a homecoming. Following his Bachelor of Science at UW–Madison with majors in biochemistry and genetics, Kirchdoerfer earned his Ph.D. in biophysics at Scripps Research Institute in Southern California. During graduate school he became fascinated by viruses while working on the flu virus and it’s an interest that guides his research today.