Hannah Distaffen

Hannah is a seventh-year graduate student in the Nilsson Group. Her research focuses on studying the effect of self-assembling amphipathic peptides on model lipid membranes and comparing them to molecular dynamics simulations from Cristiano Dias’s group at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. In her other project, she is studying how amino acid substitutions in an amphipathic peptide affect its self-assembling properties in pleated and rippled beta-sheet assemblies. She is collaborating with Andrew Nieuwkoop’s Lab at Rutgers University for solid-state NMR and Ed Egelman’s Lab at Virginia University for cryo-EM analysis of her peptides.

Education:

2021 – M.S. in Chemistry, University of Rochester (Rochester, NY, USA).

2018 – B.S. in Biochemistry. Roberts Wesleyan University (Rochester, NY, USA).