Download Dr Gisela Storz Biosketch

Dr. Gisela Storz : A brief biosketch Dr. Gisela Storz received a B.A. in Biochemistry from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1984 and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1988 from the University of California at Berkeley, where she worked with Bruce Ames. After postdoctoral fellowships with Sankar Adhya at the National Cancer Institute and Fred Ausubel at Harvard Medical School, she moved to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, where she is a Senior Investigator. Dr. Storz has made contributions in multiple fields of molecular biology, including groundbreaking experiments on the sensing of oxidative stress and the roles of regulatory RNAs and small proteins in bacteria. She showed that, upon oxidative stress, disulfide bond formation in the transcription regulator OxyR changed the protein from a repressor to an activator, a beautiful example of direct environmental modulation of regulator function. As a result of the serendipitous detection of the peroxide-­‐induced OxyS RNA, one of the first small, regulatory RNAs to be discovered, work in her lab shifted to the genome-­‐wide identification and study of small RNAs. Characterization of these small RNAs revealed that the RNA chaperone Hfq stimulates the pairing of the majority of the small RNAs with mRNA targets and that the small RNAs are integral to most regulatory circuits in bacteria. Recently, work in the Storz lab has extended to the detection and study of proteins of less than 50 amino acids, another class of molecules overlooked by traditional methods of investigation. Dr. Storz is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and National Academy of Sciences, and received the American Society for Microbiology Eli Lilly Award in 2000.