People

One principal investigator, one research assistant, about six student researchers, and the alumni they turned into.

Principal investigator

Deepa V. Dabir, Ph.D.

Chair and Professor of Biology
Seaver College of Science and Engineering, Loyola Marymount University

She came to mitochondria from neurodegeneration, by way of a Ph.D. at Penn and a postdoc with Carol Koehler at UCLA, and has run an NIH-funded lab at LMU since 2019.

Education

Ph.D., Biology, University of Pennsylvania: 2006
M.S., Biotechnology, University of Pune: 2000
B.S. with honors, Life Sciences and Biochemistry, St. Xavier's College, Mumbai: 1998

Where the work comes from

University of Pennsylvania
Doctoral work on neurodegeneration rather than mitochondria: tau pathology in astrocytes, alphaB-crystallin in tauopathies, and glutamate transport, with Trojanowski, Lee, and Forman.
UCLA, Carol Koehler's lab
The pivot. Postdoctoral work on the Mia40-Erv1 disulfide relay, including the 2007 EMBO Journal paper she led on where the electrons go.
Loyola Marymount University
Her own lab, NIH-funded and staffed by undergraduates, working on mitochondrial protein import in budding yeast.

Research Assistant

Name

Research Assistant

The research assistant keeps the lab running between student cohorts: strain collections, media, instruments, and the training of every new undergraduate who walks in.

Name, photograph, and project to come.

Students

About six undergraduate and master's researchers work in the lab at a time. They run their own projects, present their own findings, and several have become authors on the papers that came out of them.

PR
Priya Raghunathan
'27
Testing whether Aim32 is required for normal respiration in yeast grown on non-fermentable carbon.
MO
Marcus Oyelaran
'26
Tagging Aim32 in both compartments to find out whether the two pools do different jobs.
SD
Sofia Delgado-Reyes
'27
Following electrons from Erv1 to fumarate through Osm1 in isolated mitochondria.
JF
Jonah Feldman
'26
Screening import-defective mutants for changes in mitoribosome assembly.
AN
Amara Nwosu
M.S.
Reconstituting the Mia40-Erv1 relay outside the cell to measure how fast it turns over.
DS
Diego Salas
'28
Building the strain collection the other five projects run on.

Placeholder roster. Every name and project line below is invented, standing in until Dr. Dabir sends the real six.

Key alumni

Where the lab's former researchers went next. This is the part of a lab site that actually proves something, so it should be long.

Kamilah Roca-Datzer'22: Co-author on the 2021 Aim32 paper. Confirmed, destination unknown.
Elena Vasquez'23: Ph.D. in biochemistry, UC San Diego
Thomas Adeyemi'22: M.D. candidate, Keck School of Medicine
Rachel Kwan'21: Research associate, Amgen
Isabel Moreno'20: Ph.D. in cell biology, Northwestern
Daniel Park'19: Genetic counselor, Cedars-Sinai

Placeholder alumni. Real names and destinations come from Dr. Dabir. Kamilah Roca-Datzer '22 is the one confirmed name we have.