Kathleen Sicinski
Staff Scientist, Protein Engineer California Institute of Technology
Kathleen (Katie) Sicinski obtained her PhD in Chemistry from Tufts University, where her work focused on developing novel chemical methods to improve the in vivo stability, delivery, and efficacy of GLP-1 and related peptides for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, and more. Following her PhD, she joined a start-up, PepGen, Inc., where she helped establish discovery chemistry operations and develop RNA therapeutics for rare neuromuscular diseases. Katie then received an NIH postdoctoral fellowship to study protein engineering at Caltech in the lab of Prof. Frances Arnold. She is currently a Merkin Bridge Fellow at Caltech, where she combines her translational expertise with protein engineering to enable efficient biocatalytic syntheses of therapeutically relevant molecules.
Seminars
- Discuss recent advances in applying enzyme engineering and biocatalysis to enable greener, more sustainable synthetic routes
- Highlight the potential of engineered biocatalysts for transforming inexpensive chemical feedstocks, including biomass-derived materials, into useful chemical products
- Showcase how new-to-nature biocatalysis can expand the reactivity of enzymes beyond those found in biology, enabling selective chemical transformations that are difficult to achieve using traditional synthetic methods
