Kelsey H. Collins, PhD completed her undergraduate work in Exercise Biology at University of California, Davis, and earned her PhD in Biomedical Engineering at University of Calgary under the direction of Dr. Walter Herzog. During her postdoctoral studies in the Guilak Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis, she created a tissue engineering and regenerative medicine platform to determine the signaling mechanisms between adipose and musculoskeletal tissues.

My research interests focus on defining the roles and the mechanisms of enzymes and other challenging proteins in complex biological processes and on developing technologies to facilitate these studies. The current research in the Craik lab focuses on the chemical biology of proteolytic and protein degradation enzymes, receptors and membrane transporters. A particular emphasis of our work is on identifying the roles and regulating the activity of key proteins associated with infectious diseases, neurodegeneration and cancer.

Professor Dean’s research involves in vitro and bioinformatic approaches along with studies of human populations to address host-pathogen interactions, including bacterial genomics, host immune responses and microbiota/microbiome/metabolome associations with disease protection and pathogenesis related to the obligate intracellular bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis. Her group was the first to identify genomic recombination in this human pathogen. The Dean lab also studies the evolution of zoonotic chlamydial species.