Sadie Piatt

Sadie grew up in Milwaukee, WI and completed her undergraduate studies in chemistry at Emmanuel College. There, she worked under Dr. Allen Price to study the DNA target site search mechanisms of restriction endonucleases at the single-molecule level. To continue developing her skills imaging protein-DNA interaction dynamics, she joined Dr. Joseph Loparo’s lab as a biophysics graduate student investigating the regulation of error-prone translesion polymerases at stalled replication forks. Understanding the consequences of replicating damaged DNA templates is essential to developing informed models of the basic biochemical drivers of cancer, as dysregulation of these processes destabilizes genome integrity. Sadie is excited to build upon her interest in pathways driven by DNA damage and hopes to shed light on factors that trigger and exacerbate unchecked mutagenesis.