Krystle J. McLaughlin

Krystle J. McLaughlin earned a B.A. in Physics from Colgate University in 2006, followed by a PhD in Biophysics at the University of Rochester in 2011. She was then a postdoctoral scholar in the NIGMS IRACDA SPIRE program at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which emphasized teaching and pedagogical training, along with traditional research. Dr. McLaughlin joined the Vassar Chemistry department in 2017.

She teaches General Chemistry (Chem 125), Protein Crystallography (Chem/Bioc 295), Biochemistry (Bioc 272), Biophysical Chemistry (Bioc 326), and Biochemistry Senior Seminar (Bioc 356). Dr. McLaughlin is also interested in best practices in science pedagogy, most notably in developing Course-Based Undergraduate Research (CUREs) classes, such as her Protein Crystallography course (Chem/Bioc 295) which is a CURE that allows students to have an authentic research experience in protein crystallography as part of the curriculum. Her research interests are focused on the biochemical and biophysical study of proteins from diverse microbial systems such as the gut microbe Bacteroides ovatus and antibiotic resistance transfer in Staphylococcus and Salmonella. Her lab makes primary use of structural biology techniques like macromolecular x-ray crystallography and cryo-EM to investigate protein structure and function.

Dr. McLaughlin is currently the co-chair of the Scientific Advisory Board for the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) Centers for Research on Structural Biology of Infectious Diseases (CRSTAL-ID). The Advisory Board makes recommendations to the CRSTAL-ID centers on future directions, provide advice on centers’ operations, scientific progress, outreach to the scientific community, target selection approaches, and improving the 3D structure determination service to the scientific community.

She also serves as part of the RCSB PDB Training, Outreach, & Education Working Group. The RCSB PDB is the US data center for the global Protein Data Bank (PDB) archive of 3D structure data for large biological molecules (proteins, DNA, and RNA) essential for research and education in fundamental biology, health, energy, and biotechnology.