Chemical Engineering Seminar
Polly Fordyce is an Assistant Professor of Genetics and Bioengineering and fellow of the ChEM-H Institute at Stanford, where her laboratory focuses on developing and applying new microfluidic platforms for quantitative, high-throughput biophysics and biochemistry and single-cell genomics. She graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with undergraduate degrees in physics and biology before moving to Stanford University, where she earned a Ph.D. in physics for work with Professor Steve Block developing instrumentation and assays for single-molecule studies of kinesin motor proteins. For her postdoctoral research, she worked with Professor Joe DeRisi to develop a new microfluidic platform for understanding how transcription factors recognize and bind their DNA targets as well as a new technology for bead-based multiplexing. She is the recipient of a number of awards, including an NIH New Innovator Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, and is a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator.
Recent technological advances in genomics and proteomics have driven an explosion in our knowledge of the molecular parts within cells. Interactions between these parts drive all biological processes: proteins bind DNA and RNA to regulate transcription and translation,
dense networks of protein-protein interactions convey cellular signals, and enzyme-substrate interactions allow all of the chemical transformations essential for metabolism and signaling. The strength of these interactions predicts the timing and identity of downstream responses; therefore, quantitative biophysical and biochemical measurements are critical to decipher these networks, predict how they are disrupted in disease, and manipulate them for therapeutic
purposes. In this seminar, I'll present the development of and results from several new microfluidic platforms that make it possible to acquire quantitative biochemical and biophysical data in vitro for thousands to millions of sequence variants in parallel.