#  Professor Laura M.K. Dassama (Stanford University) 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **May 5, 2026** 

 04:15PM - 05:45PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Pfizer Lecture Hall**  



 

 



 

Title: ***Discovering and exploiting metabolic vulnerabilities in pathogenic bacteria***

Abstract: Increased human exposure to pathogens couples with rising antibiotic resistance and slow antibiotic development to pose a nearly insurmountable human health challenge. My work aims to discover proteins critical for pathogen survival, to reveal important insights into their mechanisms of action, and to develop chemical tools that precisely modulate their functions. By focusing on pathogens with limited or unique metabolic capabilities, we aim to discover novel biomarkers and antibiotic targets that are less likely to evade inhibitors. This talk will describe our use of informatics and other “omics” methods along with protein biochemistry and biophysics to accelerate the proteome-wide discovery of critical metabolite handling proteins in human pathogens.

Biography: Laura M. K. Dassama is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University, an Assistant Professor of Microbiology & Immunology at Stanford School of Medicine, and an Institute Scholar at the Sarafan ChEM-H Institute. Her research focuses on the discovery of novel ways to disable pathogenic bacteria. Her approach is multidisciplinary, employing chemistry, biophysics, and data science to uncover bespoke strategies to curtail pathogen survival.

She received her Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry from Temple University in 2007 and a PhD in Biochemistry, Microbiology, and Molecular Biology from the Pennsylvania State University in 2013. Her PhD research, performed under the mentorship of Marty Bollinger and Carsten Krebs, focused on oxygen-utilizing metalloenzymes. As a postdoctoral fellow with Amy Rosenzweig at Northwestern University, she studied the biosynthesis and trafficking of bacterial secondary metabolites. In 2017, spent a year working as a visiting scientist in the group of Stuart Orkin at Boston Children’s Hospital where she pursued a long-standing personal interest in sickle cell disease. She began her tenure as an independent scientist at Stanford in 2018. Since commencing her independent career, the Dassama group has, among others, identified novel proteins involved in lipid acquisition by human pathogens with defective lipid metabolism.



 

 



 

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