Mohamad Dandan, PhD

Postdoc

James Fraser, University of California, San Francisco

Pronouns: he/him

My name is Mohamad Dandan and I hail from Southern California where I was raised on a ten acre farm, descending from a Lebanese and Costa Rican lineage. I am a first-generation, underrepresented minority that strives for increasing diversity in STEM. This would not be possible without completing my Bachelor of Science with a major in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Irvine. Recently, I completed my PhD in Metabolic Biology at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Nutritional Science and Toxicology where I conducted research in the lab of Dr. Marc Hellerstein. The overarching theme in our lab involves the development and application of stable isotopic metabolic labeling with heavy water combined with tandem mass spectrometry to measure the kinetics of biological molecules in metabolic pathways to address these unmeet needs in human health and disease. My dissertation focused on the kinetics of low abundant molecules including receptors, hormones and signaling molecules using heavy water labeling and mass spectrometry.

For my postdoctoral studies, I decided to obtain training in Biophysics and Structural Biology across the bay at the University of California, San Francisco in Dr. James Fraser's lab. The main focus of the lab is on discovering the fundamental principles of macromolecular structure and dynamics. We are interested in defining conformational states that are essential for function and understanding how conformational transitions couple to biological mechanisms. Specifically, I am training on Cryogenic Electron Microscopy methods to study ribosomal structures of M. tuberculosis. I hope to integrate both fields of metabolism and biophysics.