I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the Bloomberg School of Public Health and have a joint appointment in the Department of Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry in the School of Medicine.   The Kavran Lab was launched in the summer of 2015.   My career in science did not start there.  I did my post-doc in the Lab of Dan Leahy where I investigated the activation mechanism of the Type-1 Insulin-like Growth Factor Receptor (IGF1R),   For my graduate work, I studied with Tom Steitz at Yale University where I performed structural studies on pyrrolysine-tRNA synthetase and the 50S large ribosomal subunit.    Before all of that, my first research project was as an undergraduate in the lab of Mark Lemmon at the University of Pennsylvania where I studied the binding specificities of pleckstrin homology (PH) domains.   PH domains are small domains found in a variety of signaling proteins, so it would be fair to say that my interest in signaling pathways started there.