User:Melanie berkmen

Bio

Hi. My name is Melanie Barker Berkmen. I am a post-doc in Alan Grossman's lab. Back to the Grossman Lab Webpage

email: mberkmen@mit.edu
phone: 617-253-6702

Education

(2002-present) Jane Coffin Childs Post-Doctoral Fellow
Massachusetts Insitute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
31 Ames St, Building 68, Room 540D Laboratory of Alan D. Grossman

(2001) Ph.D., Cellular and Molecular Biology
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madision, WI
Laboratory of Richard L. Gourse
http://www.bact.wisc.edu/GradStudies/GourseRichard.htm

(1995) B.S., Biochemistry
University of Dayton, Dayton, OH, summa cum laude

Personal

My husband, Mehmet Berkmen, is also a microbiologist. He was a post-doc in Jon Beckwith's lab at Harvard Medical School.
http://beck2.med.harvard.edu/
Now he is at the biotech company New England Biolabs, where he is developing Escherichia coli strains and plasmids for recombinant protein production.
http://www.neb.com/nebecomm/default.asp.

Here are some of the things that I am doing when I am not in the scope room, cooking, or learning Turkish:

(Fall 2005) Co-instructor for an undergraduate seminar class at MIT
I co-taught a literature-based class on DNA dynamics in the tiny bacterial cell with Lyle Simmons. Each week we discussed two papers exploring bacterial DNA replication, chromosome and plasmid partitioning, conjugation, or cell shape. http://web.mit.edu/biology/www/undergrad/adv-ugsem.html

(2004-2005)Co-chair of the organizing committee for the 2005 Boston Bacterial Meeting
http://mcb.harvard.edu/losick/BBM2005/

(2003-present) Active Participant in the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Extended Education Group
http://www.cfkeep.org/html/snapshot.php?id=29045795 led by Graham Walker at MIT

(2005-present) Question consultant for the 2005 National Biology Olympiad
for high school students in collaboration with the Center for Excellence in Education in McLean, VA http://www.cee.org/usabo/index.shtml

(Each Spring 2004-present) Volunteer assistant/instructor for the "Science Field Trip to MIT"
that involved ~90 students from four Boston area high schools and their teachers. In 2004, I helped run a lab exercise based on microscopic observation of zebrafish embryos. In 2005 and 2006, Jenny Auchtung and I designed and ran a lab exercise based on bacterial responses to starvation and stress. We had the high school students act as CSI agents and discover whether the "mysterious white powder" found in an envelope was Bacillus spores or harmless. http://www.cfkeep.org/html/snapshot.php?id=84010578

Research

I am interested in how positional information is established within a cell. In particular, I have investigated how the replication machinery and the origin of replication are positioned inside Bacillus subtilis using fluorescence microscopy and a variety of molecular biological techniques. I am currently exploring the cellular localization of the conjugative transposon ICEBs1 DNA and conjugation machinery. Back to the Grossman Lab Webpage