Tobias W. Giessen, PhD
Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry
Faculty Member, Program in Chemical Biology
Faculty Member, Cellular & Molecular Biology Program
Faculty Member, Program in Biomedical Sciences

E-mail: tgiessen@umich.edu

Education:
Diplom (BS/MS), Chemistry, Philipps-University Marburg, Germany
PhD, Biochemistry, Philipps-University Marburg, Germany
Postdoc, Synthetic Biology, Harvard Medical School | Wyss Institute at Harvard

Mike is from Indiana and received his undergraduate degree from Indiana University-Bloomington. He is currently finishing his PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Ivan Rayment’s lab where he is studying the cardiac myosin rod and synthetic myosin thick filaments by electron microscopy and x-ray crystallography. He is interested in using cryo-EM to study large macromolecular assemblies, as well as using protein engineering to produce proteins with novel and practical functions.

Asif was born and raised in Lincolnshire, in the United Kingdom, and completed undergraduate studies in Natural Sciences at the University of Leeds. He also received his PhD from Leeds, under the supervision of Ryan Seipke, and with a focus on understanding natural product biosynthetic systems from bacteria. In addition to postgraduate studies, Asif also completed postdoctoral research in the Seipke lab, where the focus was exploiting natural product biosynthetic enzymes for synthetic applications. Overall, he is interested in natural product biosynthesis and how encapsulation affects synthetic systems, as well as using structural and functional techniques to discover, characterize and exploit novel encapsulation systems.

Sarah is from Indiana and received her undergraduate degree from Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis. She then worked in Dr. Emily Scott’s lab at the University of Michigan to obtain her PhD in Medicinal Chemistry. She is interested in using structural biology and particularly cryo-EM to characterize novel encapsulin systems.

Kwon is from South Korea and graduated with a BS in Chemical Engineering from POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology) in South Korea. He trained in cellular engineering while doing research related to metabolic engineering during his undergraduate. He is also the recipient of the Korean government scholarship for study overseas (KGSPSO). Kwon is broadly interested in synthetic biology, protein engineering, and their application in biomedical fields such as developing novel living therapeutics.

Natalia is from Southern California. She graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a bachelor's in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. As an undergraduate, she investigated how glycosylation affected the prion protein's ability to regulate itself and maintain its proper fold. During her gap year, she did a postbac at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center where she elucidated a series of structures from an engineered homing endonuclease in order to understand how novel DNA recognition specificity can be achieved. Natalia is broadly interested in using structural biology tools to better understand the functionality of proteins and the role encapsulin systems play in pathogenicity and virulence.

Sania is from France and graduated with a BS in Biochemistry and a MS in Quantitative Biology from the University of Montpellier, France. She completed her Honors thesis at the University of Michigan in the Bardwell lab, characterizing the structure and function of enzymes enhanced by directed evolution. She is broadly interested in the structural biology of proteins to understand their function in enzymatic activity or self-assembly.