个人简介

Amanda Fenner received her BA in Biology and Chemistry at Luther College, a small liberal arts college in Decorah, IA. At Luther, she conducted research in organometallics, developing titanium-based catalysts for converting corn monomers into biodegradable plastic. She received her PhD in Medicinal and Natural Products Chemistry from the University of Iowa in 2011, where she worked on the design, synthesis, and evaluation of small-molecule mimics of heparan sulfate. From 2011 to 2013, she was a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. William Gerwick’s laboratory at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Her research included isolation of bioactive marine natural products from cyanobacteria and the dereplication of molecular structures using MSn molecular networking. For her second year in the Gerwick laboratory, she moved to Panama City, Panama, where she ran the group’s satellite laboratory at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute as part the International Cooperative Biodiversity Group (ICBG). In Panama, she collected cyanobacteria from Pacific and Caribbean coasts and isolated cyanobacterial metabolites active against diseases prevalent in Panama, including leishmaniasis, cancer, Chagas’ disease and malaria.