Hannah Lusk

 

 

Hannah Lusk is originally from Lawrence, Kansas. Hannah was in the Welti lab from November 2015 to July 2019; her work involved analyzing mutations in genes involved in lipid metabolism in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. For her master's thesis project, Hannah identified a novel allelic mutant of the Arabidopsis gene FAD6 (FATTY ACID DESATURASE 6) using genome mapping. Then, she heterologously expressed wild type FAD6 in yeast and designed primers to generate point mutations at conserved residues and truncations of the C-terminus. The goal of this project was to express the new alleles in yeast to examine the effect of the alterations on enzyme activity. This work was published and highlighted in Plant and Cell Physiology in September 2022.

Hannah graduated with concurrent B.S. and M.S. degrees in Biochemistry from Kansas State University in spring 2019, and in fall 2019 began her doctoral studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she joined the lab of Dr. Laura Sanchez. Hannah relocated with the Sanchez lab to the University of California Santa Cruz in January 2021, and will graduate with her PhD in spring 2024. Her doctoral dissertation work is focused on studying metabolic alterations in the metastasis of high grade serous ovarian cancer using mass spectrometry-based metabolomics. After completing her Ph.D., Hannah plans to do a postdoctoral fellowship in clinical chemistry and pursue a career as a clinical laboratory director.