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I received my doctorate in philosophy (Ph.D) in microbiology in July 2004 while studying in the Department of Botany and Microbiology at the University of Oklahoma, Norman. It was a long, strange trip but here's a bit of background of my studies. My dissertation work was started in the laboratory of David McCarthy, PhD. My original work was on the adaptation of an in situ helicase activity gel system developed by one of Dr. McCarthy's former students, Sanjay K. Shukla, Ph.D. This system allowed for the detection of several DNA metabolic activities from proteins separted by PAGE (one-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis). The goals of my work were to:
While this work was going well, unfortunately, additional funding to pursue this work was not forthcoming. As such, Dr. McCarthy and I switched my project focus to take advantage of the release of the complete DNA sequence of the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae. This organism was the first free-living organism to have it complete DNA sequence solved. Dr. McCarthy had been studying aspects of DNA metabolism in this organism since the 1970's so it wasn't a major change for our laboratory as a whole. The goal of this new work was to utilize or develop new methods of functional genomics to study this bacterium. This was accomplished by:
Dr. McCarthy left OU in 2001 to become the Chief Science Officer of Ribomed Biotechnologies, Inc. Fortunately, Terrence L. Stull, M.D., took me into his laboratory at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center to allow me to finish up the last bits of my work and the writing of my dissertation.
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