Douglas L. Theobald

Assistant Professor
Department of Biochemistry
Brandeis University
Kosow-Wolfson 308

MS 009
415 South St
Waltham, MA 02454
(781) 736-2303
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Current Members

Brian C. Beckett, graduate student

Mr Beckett is our local Canadian, hailing from McGill. Brian is studying the role of strong epistasis in the evolution of substrate specificity in the Apicomplexan malate and lactate dehydrogenases.
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Jeff Boucher, graduate student

Jeff Boucher holds a BS in Biochemistry from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and he is currently a graduate student in the Biochemistry program here at Brandeis. In his former life, Jeff spent over four years slaving for biotechnology companies in the Boston area, including Pierce Biotechnology, Phylogix, and Epitome Biosystems. Jeff is investigating the evolution of substrate specificity in Apicomplexan malate and lactate dehydrogenases.
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Erin Devine, graduate student

Erin studies the evolution of visual cone opsins in metazoans. She's also interested in the physical constraints on rhodopsin and GPCR structure and evolution, and the implications for discerning homology from convergence.
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Kristine Mackin, graduate student

Kristine's thesis project explores the biophysical constraints on the evolution of bacteriorhodopsin and the implications for convergence of the GPCR protein fold in rhodopsins from bacteria, arachaea, and eumetazoans.
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Rick Roy, graduate student

Rick works on understanding the functional and structural constraints on universally conserved residues in Type I rhodopsins.
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Phillip Steindel, graduate student

Phillip Steindel is a graduate student in the Biophysics and Structural Biology program. He has a BS in Chemistry from UNC-Chapel Hill. Phil is developing Bayesian and likelihood methods for analyzing macromolecular structures, in addition to the evolution of substrate specificity in parabasalid malate and lactate dehydrogenases.
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Mackenzie Gallegos, Research Technician (Brandeis 2011)

Mackenzie keeps the world turning.
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Michelle Y. Fry, undergraduate student (2015)

Michelle is trying to make a constitutive dimer from tetrameric Apicomplexan lactate dehydrogenases.
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Joe Jacobowitz, undergraduate student (2014)

Joe is figuring out how Plasmodium falsciparum lactate dehydrogenase has such strong specificity for its substrate. He's good at crystallizing proteins, especially ancestral 2-hydroxyacid dehydrogenases.
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Past Members

Adam Drake, undergraduate student (2013)

Adam's thesis research developed better phylogenetic methods for modeling the evolution of transmembrane proteins by explicitly incorporating structural information. He graduated in 2013 with an MS/BS in Biochemistry, highest honors. Adam is now spending the summer of 2013 in the Adirondack woods.
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Emily Chen, undergraduate student (2013)

Emily helped determine the crystal structures of both ancestral and modern malate/lactate dehydrogenases.
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Amy Eisenberg, undergraduate student (2012)

Amy's senior thesis was on the physical requirements on the position and identity of the conserved "counterion" aspartate residue in bacteriorhodopsin, including its evolutionary implications.
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Megan Peck, High school student

Marcus Kelly, undergraduate student (2011)

While in the lab, Mark's senior thesis involved the development of membrane protein specific substitution matrices for modeling transmembrane proteins. Mark is currently a graduate student at Stanford.
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Nathaniel Lazar, undergraduate student (2010)

During his tenure in the lab, Nat's thesis research involved developing structural methods for analyzing and determining rates of evolution specific to particular protein families. Nat is currently a graduate student at Cornell.
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