Every year, students are involved in biochemical research both on- and off-campus, over the summer and during the academic year.

Many students use their research experience as the basis for senior capstone projects, honors theses or even peer-reviewed publications. Students may perform research for course credit, or internal and external funding allows many students to receive stipends during their time in the research lab.

Macalester faculty in the Biochemistry Program have a breadth of research expertise to fit the interest of nearly any Biochemistry student, spanning:

• enzymology (Calderone)
• bioinorganic chemistry (Splan)
• developmental biology  (Montgomery)
• synthetic chemistry  (Hoye, Brisbois)
• plant physiology  (Overvoorde)
• immunology  (Chatterjea)
• neurobiology  (Aanonsen)

Faculty research has been funded by grants from the Research Corporation, American Chemical Society, Dreyfus Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health, and is supported by access to an array of research instrumentation comparable to large research institutions.

Recent honors theses include:

•  “Development of Asymmetric Bivalent Peptides That Target the X-Linked Inhibitor of Apoptosis Protein” Kelsey Speer (Biology ’10)
• “Immune Semaphorin Expression in the Thymus and Bone Marrow of the C57BL/6 Mice” Leonor Añó (Biology ’10)
• “Characterization of the Flavin-Dependent Monooxygenase SidA Involved in Siderophore Biosynthesis in Aspergillus nidulans” Christina Fitzsimmons (Chemistry ’11)

The Macalester College Science and Research Office (SRO) coordinates and facilitates the identification of both on- and off-campus research activities.