Michael Metrick

Michael began his research career as a junior wandering into the lab of Gina MacDonald at James Madison University. What initially began as a means of filling out a requirement to graduate with honors quickly evolved into curiosity about the fundamentals of how proteins fold and misfold. He and Gina were interested in a simple question, how the enigmatic Hofmeister series of anions and cations affects the folding and misfolding of model proteins myoglobin and lysozyme, and what makes the protein RecA adopt an inverse Hofmeister stabilization profile. To investigate this, they used many biophysical and spectroscopic techniques focused around thermal unfolding of the proteins in various salt environments.

Upon graduating and completing my thesis, Michael was awarded the Dean’s Award for Academic Excellence in Chemistry, the Excellence in Biotechnology Award, the Margaret A. Gordon Memorial Scholarship, and the Frank A. Palocsay Award in Undergraduate Chemistry Research. His time at JMU prepared him for a brief postbaccalaureate IRTA in Peter Schuck’s lab at NIBIB where I studied protein-protein interactions with analytical ultracentrifugation. Outside of academics and studying, he’s an avid reader of political news, local concert-goer, chicago-explorer, runner, and swimmer.

As an NIH Cambridge scholar, he plans to explore mechanisms prion disease propagation and how the physiological microenvironment interacts with misfolded aggregates in the brain.