New Faculty

The department welcomes new faculty member from Harvard Medical School...

Joshua LaBaer, a Phoenix native, is in the process of relocating his lab to the Biodesign Institute as director of the new Virginia G. Piper Center for Personalized Diagnostics. Dr. LaBaer most recently served as director of the Harvard Institute of Proteomics.

"In the future, we will look back at our current list of illnesses as a gross oversimplification," said LaBaer. "Already, in our modern era of molecular medicine, we are learning that what we have thought about as single diseases like inflammatory bowel disease or breast cancer actually include many different molecular variations, each with a different root cause, a different prognosis and a response to specific therapies. Our lab hopes to help develop new diagnostic tools that pinpoint the specific molecular disease for each patient and direct physicians to the right therapeutic strategy for that individual."

Dan Buttry accepted the position of Professor of the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, and started from spring 2008.

Professor Buttry earned a B. A. with highest distinction in chemistry, magna cum laude, in 1979 at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. He subsequently attended the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, receiving a Ph. D. degree in Electrochemistry in 1983. After graduating, he accepted a position as a Member of the Research Staff at IBM’s San Jose Research Lab (now the Almaden Research Lab). In 1985, he moved to the University of Wyoming as an assistant professor, where his research effort was initially focused on applications of the quartz crystal microbalance in electrochemistry and chemical sensor research and development. He became a professor in 1992 and served as head of the department from 1999-2002. His research interests have broadened to include new materials for battery and fuel cell applications, interfacial chemistry in corrosion, and electrochemical behavior of nanoscale materials and nanocomposites. His group has been supported by many agencies and companies, including the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Department of Energy.

Kevin E. Redding started in spring 2008 as an associate professor.

Dr. Redding received his Ph.D from the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University, where he studied intracellular protein transport and sorting in the secretory pathway of yeast cells. He decided to move into electron transfer processes, specifically in photosynthetic proteins, when he started his postdoctoral research in the group of Jean-David Rochaix at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. He continued working on several problems in photosynthesis upon returning to the US as an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Alabama. He was promoted to associate professor in 2004. He has been working at the IBPC in Paris on a variety of topics, including an in vivo analysis of electron transfer reactions within heliobacterial cells.

Alexandra Ros accepted the position of assistant professor of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, will start in spring 2008.

Dr. Ros came from Bielefeld University, Germany. She started her studies at Technical University Munich, graduated at Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg with a Diploma in Chemistry in 1995 and completed her PhD from Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, in 2000. In the same year she moved to Bielefeld University and held postdoctoral in the Experimental Biophysics & Applied Nanoscience Group. Since 2001 she is PI of several German National Science Foundation funded projects. In July 2007, she obtained her Habilitation at the Physics Faculty, Bielefeld University.

Her research area focuses on micro- and nanofluidics for the investigation of the physical and chemical basis of migration mechanisms for colloids as well as biopolymers. She develops tailored micro- and nanodevices with the ultimate goal of elucidating novel (bio-)analytical separation methods and analyses migration processes by optical single molecule as well as ensemble techniques. She is further interested in single cell analysis on microfluidic platforms providing new biotechnological tools for proteom research and systems nanobiology.