May defends her PhD thesis

Congratulations to May Taw who defended her PhD thesis on July 24, 2019! Her thesis focused on understanding and engineering a remarkable protein translocation mechanism in bacteria that enables export of folded protein structures, a truly rare phenomenon in nature. One of the most notable parts of her thesis research was the discovery of a "folding sensor" that proofreads protein substrates prior to their translocation, allowing only correctly folded proteins but not misfolded ones to be translocated across the bacterial cytoplasmic membrane. May is now a postdoctoral research associate in the DeLisa group at Cornell, where she is working in the area of bacterial protein glycosylation.