Our laboratory has expertise in chemical biology, biochemistry, biophysics, and cell biology.
The Cotruvo lab is multidisciplinary at its heart. Students will learn a wide range of techniques in the fields of biochemistry and chemical biology: enzymology, protein engineering, spectroscopy, sensor design, fluorescence microscopy, molecular biology, mammalian cell culture, microbiology, and bacterial genetics. Some projects also involve synthetic chemistry.
Penn State is one of the world's best environments to do research in bioinorganic chemistry, and students will have opportunities to collaborate on spectroscopy and structure determination (NMR and x-ray crystallography) of the proteins we characterize. They will also be able to work with microbial pathogens in our lab and through collaborations.