E-Mail : ldougan@biology.columbia.edu
Phone : (212) 854 9606
Curriculum Vitae: PDF

I completed my PhD in the School of Physics at the University of Edinburgh. My thesis involved exploring the structure and dynamics of aqueous alcohol solutions under high pressure and low temperature. I investigated the dynamics of the system using Time Resolved Fluorescence Spectroscopy at the Collaborative Optical Spectroscopic and Micromanipulation Centre (COSMIC). I studied the structure of the system using neutron diffraction at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories, Oxford, UK http://www.isis.rl.ac.uk. My motivation was to understand the behavior of water in this simple aqueous amphiphile system.

I am hoping to use this knowledge of water and the liquid environment to explore more biologically complex systems. In the Fernandez Lab I am combining two powerful tools, force clamp spectroscopy and solvent substitution, to characterize distinct species in the unfolding and folding pathway of a protein. By accurately measuring the single molecule behavior of indivdual proteins and their different response to the solvent environment fresh insight can be gained into the fundamental driving forces in protein folding.

Selected publications:
Tandem Repeating Modular Proteins Avoid Aggregation in Single Molecule Force Spectroscopy Experiments, J. Phys. Chem A. 111, 12402 (2007)

Signatures of hydrophobic collapse in extended proteins captured with force spectroscopy, PNAS, 104, 7916 (2007)

Excess entropy in alcohol-water solutions: a simple clustering explanation, J. Phys. Chem. B, 110 (8), 3472 (2006)

Segregation in aqueous methanol enhanced by cooling and compression, J. Chem. Phys, 122, 174514, (2005)

Methanol-water solutions: A bi-percolating liquid mixture, J. Chem. Phys, 121, 6456, (2004)

Probing the liquid state structure and dynamics of aqueous solutions using fluorescence spectroscopy, J. Fluorescence, 14, 91, (2004)