Samantha N. Cohen, 2021 Alison Huxford Fellow
About the Fellow: Samantha Cohen is a graduate of UC Riverside. She entered the graduate program in Chemistry & Biochemistry at SDSU in 2015 and advanced to Ph.D. candidacy in 2018. Sam’s doctoral research centers upon understanding how cells control the activity of the important signaling enzyme known as the IκB Kinase (IKK) complex. This enzyme is largely responsible for the cellular decision to mount a genetically encoded response to any of a number of diverse potentially harmful environmental stimuli by unleashing the gene expression potential of transcription factor NF-κB. Sam is taking the novel approach of engineering, expressing, purifying, and directly studying a version of the IKK complex that functions in a key innate immune signaling pathway in fruit flies. Her work is providing some of the first direct structural and biochemical measurements of this fascinating enzyme complex.