Dr. Allegra Aron,
Principal Investigator
Allegra Aron grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA and earned her B.S. from Brown University, working with Professor Eunsuk Kim. In 2012, she started her graduate studies with Professor Christopher Chang at the University of California, Berkeley. As a recipient of NSF GRFP, Allegra developed fluorescent and bioluminescent sensors for iron. Allegra moved to the University of California, San Diego in 2018 to join the laboratory of Pieter Dorrestein, where she developed mass spectrometry methods for finding small molecule metal-binding compounds from complex samples. Outside of the lab, Allegra loves rock climbing, skiing, road biking, hiking, and has recently started surfing.
Graduate Students
Anastasiia Kostenko was born and raised in Kyiv, Ukraine where she earned her BSc in Biology. In 2017 she received Fulbright Scholarship that let her pursue MSc degree in Chemistry at East Carolina University. Under the supervision of Dr. Adam Offenbacher, she studied structure-function relationship of manganese lipoxygenase from pathogenic fungi. She demonstrated that hydrogen transfer step, associated with C–H activation is rate-limiting in enzyme catalysis and occurs by a hydrogen tunneling mechanism. In 2019 she joined Dr. John Latham’s lab at DU as a PhD student, where she identified and experimentally characterized rSAM enzyme that installs novel macrocyclization motif on ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptide. In her free time Anastasiia enjoys playing volleyball, skiing, dancing, and making pysanky.
Undergraduate Students
James Elofson was born and raised in Denver, CO. He completed his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and is on tract to get his Master's degree from the University of Denver in Computer Science in 2024. James has an interest in medicine and bioinformatics so was eager to give computational mass spectrometry a try.