Craig W Vander Kooi, Ph.D.

The Vander Kooi lab focuses on determining the mechanism of physical interactions underlying fundamental biological processes and human disease. The laboratory utilizes complimentary structural and mass-spectrometry based tools combined with biochemical, cellular, and animal model systems.

Through my training, I developed a profound appreciation for the power of atomic, molecular, and cellular spatial tools to provide deep biological insight. As a graduate student with Dr. Walter Chazin, I learned to use NMR and biochemical tools to describe the structure and interaction of proteins and developed a keen appreciation for the power of structural biology to provide deep biological insight on an atomic level. As a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Daniel Leahy, I developed expertise in X-ray crystallography and biophysical tools to study receptor function, and developed a deep interest in understanding the basis for receptor cascades in key biological signaling pathways associated with disease.

Ongoing work includes: -Using the tools of structural biology to describe the mechanism of glucan kinases/phosphatases and engineer their function for therapeutic utilization, in collaboration with Dr. Matthew Gentry. -Understanding the molecular basis of hearing loss associated with mutations in GIPC3, in collaboration with Drs. Gregory Frolenkov and Bo Zhao. -Utilizing molecular spatial imaging as co-Director of the Center for Advanced Spatial Biomolecule Research (CASBR) at the University of Florida. Ongoing work with Drs. Ramon Sun and Matthew Gentry focuses on developing novel technologies to understand biological and pathological processes using MALDI-MSI.