After more than five years at UC Berkeley, I’ve finally completed my PhD! And just in time, my paper on a type of inflammasome—a cluster of proteins that’s part of the immune system—came out in the journal Science. I owe a lot to all my coauthors, but especially my co-first author, Jeannette Tenthorey. She was responsible for most of the biochemical work reported in the paper, while my job was to determine the structure of the inflammasome.
Here’s a video I made of the inflammasome structure described in the paper:
I also wrote an article for the Berkeley Science Review about what life was really like in my lab. Spoiler alert: I stayed up all night in a cold, dark basement with only an electron microscope and a rogue spider to keep me company.