Speaker Profile
Patricia C. Dos Santos

Patricia C. Dos Santos BS, B.Pharm, PhD

Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics
Winston Salem, North Carolina, United States of America

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Patricia Dos Santos is an associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Chemistry at Wake Forest University. She was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where she received a B.S. in Pharmacy from the Federal University of the Rio Grande do Sul. In 2001 she moved to the U.S.A. for her graduate studies at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA. She obtained a Ph.D. in 2004 with Dennis Dean. Her dissertation work involved the use of a combination microbial genetics, biochemical, and spectroscopic techniques to studied the „Biosynthesis and Function of Nitrogenase Metalloclusters“.

She remained at Virginia Tech for her post-doctoral work and received an NSF-Advance fellowship to initiate her independent research program. She joined the Chemistry faculty at Wake Forest University in 2008 and was promoted to associate tenured professor in 2014. Dos Santos also holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Wake Forest School of Medicine and serves as outreach director of the WFU Translational Science Center.

Her research interests concentrate in the functional and mechanistic assignment of biochemical pathways in bacteria including the biosynthesis of Fe-S cluster, thionucleosides, and small molecules thiols as well as the study of biological nitrogen fixation in free-living bacteria. In 2018, she has been awarded the Robert & Debra Lee Faculty Fellowship and the Reynolds Research Leave that will provide support for a research sabbatical in the laboratory of Professor Einsle at the University of Freiburg during the academic year of 2018-2019.
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