Carina N. Gunder

I am a graduate student in the Holcombe Lab.  I grew up in upstate New York and my family currently resides in northwestern New Jersey.  I attended the University of Richmond in Virginia from 1996-2000.  After I graduated with my B.S. in chemistry I worked in Analytical R&D at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals for a couple years.  I’m now quite happy to be living in lovely Austin, Texas.

My research involves screening combinatorial libraries of polypeptides for binding to a target metal of radiological interest, such as uranium.  High-throughput screening is a challenge in combinatorial chemistry.  For the past two summers I used micro-x-ray fluorescence (MXRF) at Los Alamos National Laboratory on a fellowship from the Seaborg Institute.  Current work involves fluorescence and inductively-coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICPMS).  Once metal-specific peptide sequences have been determined, they can be synthesized and the binding can be characterized.  Also, fundamental studies into the nature of the metal binding and specificity can be explored.