Kurt Fredrick (Ph.D.)
Professor and Chair, Department of Microbiology
Member of the Center for RNA Biology and OSBP
Kurt hails from Minnesota and received his B.A. in Biology from Gustavus Adolphus College, 1992. After, he moved on to Cornell University where he got a Ph.D. in Microbiology under John Helmann and then did a Postdoc (1997-2003) at UC-Santa Cruz with Harry Noller. In 2003 he joined the Department of Microbiology at the Ohio State University. Currently serving as Chair of the Department of Microbiology since 2021. Kurt is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (2022).
Bappaditya Roy (Ph.D.)
Research Associate II, Department of Microbiology
Bappaditya is a Postdoctoral researcher in Fredrick lab since 2013. He received his Master’s in Biotechnology from Utkal University, India in 2005. He completed his Ph.D. in Biotechnology from The University of Calcutta, India under the supervision of Rajat Banerjee and Sumana Chatterjee in 2013. His research mainly focuses on to understand the molecular mechanisms of translation initiation and its regulation in Bacteria. Currently, he is an editor of the journal Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology.
Ben Warner
Graduate Student, Department of Microbiology
Center for RNA Biology Fellow / RNA Student Organization President (2021-2022)
Ben earned a B.S. in microbiology and biology from The Ohio State University in 2015. He then went on to work for a company named Green Biologics whose role was to use Clostridial ABE fermentation to produce renewable butanol and acetone. During his time with Green Biologics he worked at the pilot plant in Gahanna, OH then moved to Little Falls, MN to work at the production plant. In the spring of 2019 Ben joined the Fredrick lab.
Sepideh Fakhretaha
Graduate Student, Ohio State Biochemistry Program
Sepideh received her B.S. in Cellular & Molecular Biology with Concentration in Microbiology from University of Tehran in 2017. During her undergraduate studies, she worked on Isolation and characterization of Caspian Sea microorganisms and designing their microbial cultural systems as her Undergraduate thesis project. Joined the Fredrick lab in Spring 2019.
Fawwaz Naeem
Graduate Student, Ohio State Biochemistry Program
Center for RNA Biology Fellow
Joined the lab in Spring of 2020. I received my bachelor’s degree in Biology from Kansas State University. There, I worked with fruit flies in the Erika Geisbrecht lab where I dissected small larvae to visualize skeletal muscles using various antibodies and dyes. I then joined OSBP in Fall 2019 and then jointed the Fredrick lab Spring 2020. Here, I study programmed ribosomal frameshifting in the prfB gene in Flavobacterium johnsoniae. Outside of the lab, I like going out for walks, reading, and playing tennis.
Md Siddik Alom
Graduate Student, Ohio State Biochemistry Program
I received my BS and MS in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. I worked two years as an In-Process Quality Control (IPQC) Officer in a Pharmaceuticals Company in Bangladesh, and one year in South Korea as a research associate. I started my graduate study in the Department of Chemistry at Mississippi State University in Fall, 2018. In my research project, I tried to understand the protein-nanoparticles (NP) interactions by NMR spectroscopy. There I have contributed to develop a system to quantify the number of proteins bound to an NP using tryptophan as an external reference. I have also established a residue-based affinity scale to quantify the contribution of each residue while binding with NP surface in a competitive multiprotein-NP microenvironment. After graduating with a master’s in Biophysical Chemistry in June 2020, I joined The Ohio State Biochemistry Program (OSBP) in August of the same year. I joined Fredrick Lab in March 2021. Here I have been working to characterize a novel ribosomal protein in Flavobacterium johnsoniae by employing molecular biology, biochemical, and mass spectroscopic techniques.
Mahmuda Akter
Research Associate I, Deparment of Microbiology
I completed my BS and MS in Environmental Science from University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. I started my graduate study in Chemistry at Mississippi State University in Spring, 2020. In my research project, I worked on the initial characterization of PrnA (a flavin-dependent oxygenase) from Burkholderia ambifaria: developed an NADPH-dependent activity assay for Tryptophan halogenation. After graduating with a master’s in December 2021, I joined the Fredrick lab in January, 2022. Here, I’m working on the project aimed at identifying an unknown RNase of F. johnsoniae targeting the ribosome during ribosome purification. I’m also working on a new project to determine whether 30S subunit derived from rrsH have any regulatory role in the cell; replacing the unique sequence of rrsH with that of rrsA and characterize the resulting strain.