Hassane S. Mchaourab, Ph.D.

My research program encompasses a wide spectrum of questions that have in common a fundamental interest in how protein dynamics define or regulate biological function. The questions we pursue range from how CaMKII, a critical enzyme in long term memory, decodes the amplitude and frequency of calcium signals; how neurotransmitter transporters couple ion movement to vectorial substrate translocation; how multidrug resistance transporters harness the energy of ATP and transduce it to the mechanical work of substrate extrusion, and how small heat shock proteins, a class of oligomeric molecular chaperones, deploy subunits to recognize and bind unfolding proteins.