Leah Witus
Associate Professor of Chemistry
Chemical Biology
Olin-Rice Science Center, 310
651-696-6092
[email protected]
About the Witus Lab
Proteins are nature’s molecular machines, carrying out nearly all the functions in the cell. Using proteins outside of their natural context is a way to harness the unique capabilities of proteins to solve unmet needs in fields such as therapeutics, catalysis, and environmental remediation. However, challenges to doing so include the limited stability of proteins and synthetic accessibility. The Witus lab engages Macalester students to address these challenges through designing, creating, and characterizing protein-mimetic materials and protein conjugates. Projects include investigating how the conformation of peptides – very short proteins – affects their activity as catalysts, developing synthetic routes to new protein-mimetic structures, and comparing the effects of shielding polymers on enzyme activity towards the development of new biotherapeutics.
Professor Witus is from Michigan and attended Rice University, where she majored in chemistry and did research with Professor Jeffrey Hartgerink. She obtained her PhD in chemistry at the University of California Berkeley as part of the Chemical Biology Graduate Program, where she worked with Professor Matthew Francis on protein bioconjugation reactions. She then did research on synthetic molecular machines as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow with Professor Fraser Stoddart at Northwestern University. Professor Witus joined the faculty at Macalester College in 2015.
As a Macalester Professor, Professor Witus’s teaching centers on biochemistry and general chemistry. In addition to courses, Professor Witus views the research laboratory as a rich teaching environment. She has mentored many Macalester students in research, and together they have sought to understand and develop peptide and protein catalysts. This work has resulted in publications with Macalester student co-authors and has been awarded funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. Professor Witus is also interested in science communication with the general public.