We are proud to share that our faculty member, Dr. Bethany Buck, has been selected as a recipient of the 2025 Faculty Fellow Award from the Office of the Vice President for Research! This award provides faculty members one semester of full release time from teaching and administrative tasks, allowing them to dedicate their time to pursuing creative and scholarly projects.

What does the faculty fellow award mean to you?

Dr. Buck: I am grateful to have had my application selected for a Faculty Fellow Award (FFA) as this comes at an essential time in my career. Specifically, the past few years I have been cultivating productive collaborations, which have led to exciting new research directions for the group, as well as opportunities for high impact publications and new extramural funding streams. The FFA period will afford me the dedicated research time needed to rapidly advance these collaborative research initiatives.

Tell us about your research group, and what your research will be focused on.

Dr. Buck: My research group has had a long-standing interest in utilizing a multidisciplinary approach incorporating structural biology, biophysics, biochemistry, molecular biology and cellular biology to investigate mechanistic questions in the area of transcriptional regulation. We have been particularly interested in applying these methodologies to discern structure-function relationships for specialized transcription factors that recognize epigenetically modified methylated DNA sequences. In addition, we have been investigating the molecular mechanisms by which these specialized proteins mediate disease-supporting epigenetic-based transcriptional outcomes, particularly in prostate cancer. Recently, we have established multiple new collaborations that leverage our extensive expertise to mechanistically investigate novel protein:non-canonical DNA interactions that impact transcriptional and DNA repair pathways in cells. We are uniquely suited to address long-standing knowledge gaps in these fields, and the FFA period will be essential for providing the focused research time necessary to rapidly advance these efforts. I am fortunate to have an outstanding team of researchers, and am looking forward to working with them in these new research endeavors. (See reference images below.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Congratulations, Dr. Buck! We look forward to her continued outstanding research and contributions to our Chemistry Department.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learn more about Dr. Buck’s reasearch group.

See the full list of awardees and learn more about the Faculty Fellow Award.

4/16/2025