Committee

Dorothy Erie
Co-Chair

Dorothy obtained her B.S. from Louisiana State University and her Ph.D. from Rutgers – The State University of New Jersey. Her research group is focused in two main areas: (1) Atomic force microscopy and fluorescence studies of protein-protein and protein-nucleic acid interactions. (2) Mechanistic studies of transcription elongation.

Kathleen Nevins
Co-Chair

Kathleen Nevins grew up in Buffalo, NY, and earned her BS in chemistry from Canisius College and her PhD in chemistry from SUNY Buffalo. Between undergraduate and graduate school she participated in a year-long volunteer program in New York City. She has been an instructor and supervisor of undergraduate laboratories in the Department of Chemistry since 2012. Her passions include curriculum development and improving the overall student learning experience, including student wellness. Her hobbies are. traveling, working out, spending time with friends and family and chasing her young children around!

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Jeff Aubé

Jeffrey Aubé received a BS in chemistry from the University of Miami in 1980 and earned a PhD from Duke University in 1984. Following an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University, he joined the University of Kansas Department of Medicinal Chemistry in 1986. He remained at KU until 2015, when he moved to UNC, where he is a professor in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and jointly appointed to the Department of Chemistry and is a member of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer center. His research interests began in synthetic organic chemistry and have since extended to medicinal and biological chemistry.

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Thomas Freeman

Thomas earned his B.S. in Biochemistry at Xavier University of Louisiana in 2003. Subsequently, he earned his Ph.D. at Tulane University in Biochemistry. He did his postdoctoral training at UNC as a SPIRE, Seeding Postdoctoral Innovators in Research and Education, scholar. He spent a year teaching biochemistry at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, and joined the faculty of the Chemistry Department at UNC in 2014 as a STEM Teaching Assistant Professor. Thomas serves as the Executive Director of the Chancellor’s Science Scholars program.

Training: Mental Health First Aid, Haven, Safe Zone

Caitlin Johnson
Graduate Student Representative

Caitlin is from western Pennsylvania and earned her BS in Biochemistry and Mathematics from Saint Vincent College. She came to UNC in 2018 and is currently a member of the Erie lab. Her interests include using biological chemistry and biophysics to study DNA repair pathways and protein-DNA interactions. Outside of lab, Caitlin enjoys spending time with friends, being outside, and working out.

Jake Jagannathan
Postdoctoral Fellow Representative

Jake Jagannathan grew up in the Bay Area, California and earned his B.S. in Chemistry at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska in 2016. Jake earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in 2021 in organic chemistry. He arrived at UNC in the fall of 2021 and is a member of the Leibfarth group focusing on polymer science. In his free time, Jake enjoys cooking and biking.”

Dan Kurtz

Dan grew up in southeast Michigan where he got his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Oakland University. He then earned his PhD in inorganic chemistry from UNC Chapel Hill and did postdoctoral work at the Rowland Institute at Harvard University. After working as a scientific editor at Cell Reports Physical Science, Dan returned to the UNC Chemistry Department where he’s now the Technical Communications and Intellectual Property Manager in the Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy to Liquid Fuels. Dan enjoys cooking and baking, raising and training service dogs, exploring North Carolina, and wants to use his alumni experience in the department to help current and future students and postdocs.

David Lawrence

Professor Lawrence earned his B.S. in Biological Sciences from UC Irvine and his PhD in Chemistry, organic synthesis, from UCLA. He was subsequently an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the Rockefeller University in New York City. He is currently a Fred Eshelman Distinguished Professor at UNC. In addition to his teaching and research duties in the Department of Chemistry, he is Chairman of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry in the School of Pharmacy, a Professor of Pharmacology in the School of Medicine, and an Investigator in the Lineberger Cancer Center.