Alice Walker joins the Department of Chemistry at Wayne State

The Department of Chemistry welcomes Alice R. Walker, Ph.D.!

Walker obtained her Bachelor of Science at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and began her graduate work at Wayne State before transferring to the University of North Texas. She graduated from UNT in 2018, and her work primarily involved applying computational chemistry to biochemical systems, especially DNA polymerases.

After finishing her Ph.D., Walker went to Stanford University as a postdoctoral scholar with Todd J. Martí­nez, where she worked to simulate excited state dynamics of light-reactive proteins, especially fluorescent proteins. She also worked on collaborative efforts to understand the short-timescale dynamics of photoacids in explicit solvents.

Walker's research program at Wayne State combines her expertise in simulations of complex biochemical systems with excited state reactivity, with the aim of strengthening the links between theory and experiment by focusing on light as a shared observable feature. Her team applies various methodologies to uncover rational design principles to create new fluorescent molecules, specifically synthetic nucleobases and photoactive proteins.

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