Michael A. Fisher

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Dr. Michael A. Fisher is a Senior Fellow with the Federation of American Scientists.

Prior to joining the FAS, Mike served as Field Director with the Welle for Congress campaign (2018, New Jersey Congressional District 4). With scientific training at Rutgers-New Jersey Medical School, UC Berkeley, and Princeton, Mike has developed expertise in infectious disease research, biofuels, synthetic biology, protein engineering, and molecular biology.

Mike also has experience in informal education as a STEM Educator with the Liberty Science Center (Jersey City, NJ), public-private partnership creation as a co-founder of the UC Berkeley Postdoc Industry Exploration Program in 2010, and community organizing.

In 2012 Mike was a Fellow in the inaugural Synthetic Biology Leadership Accelerator Program cohort and was an IGCC Public Policy and Biological Threats Training Program Fellow in 2008.

Mike holds a B.S. in Biology from The College of New Jersey and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Princeton University.

Publications

The Trypanosoma cruzi RNA-binding protein RBP42 is expressed in the cytoplasm throughout the life cycle of the parasite
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00436-018-5787-9

Trypanosoma cruzi is the causative agent of Chagas disease, a debilitating and sometimes life-threatening condition for an estimated 20-30% of those infected. The T. cruzi parasite is migrating into the southern United States due in part to climate change.

An essential domain of an early-diverged RNA polymerase II functions to accurately decode a primitive chromatin landscape
https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/45/13/7886/3854956

Trypanosoma brucei, the causative agent of African Sleeping Sickness, survives by regulating gene expression predominantly at the RNA, rather than DNA, level. The T. brucei parasite threatens threatens millions of people in 36 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

Change, exchange, and rearrange: protein engineering for the biotechnological production of fuels, pharmaceuticals, and other chemicals
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0958166913000414

Designing proteins is a powerful tool to integrate into the production of chemicals.

Enhancing Tolerance to Short-Chain Alcohols by Engineering the Escherichia coli AcrB Efflux Pump to Secrete the Non-native Substrate n-Butanol
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/sb400065q

We used protein engineering to increase the tolerance of a laboratory strain of E. coli to candidate biofuels.

Testing the waters: Postdoc committees can give insight into industry career paths
https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v480/n7378/full/nj7378-576a.html

There is a disconnect between what graduate students and postdocs are trained for, and the careers they enter into. There should be opportunities for graduate students and postdocs to develop nonacademic skillsets.

De novo designed proteins from a library of artificial sequences function in Escherichia coli and enable cell growth
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0015364

We found that designed, synthetic proteins can provide life-sustaining functions for a laboratory strain of E. coli.

Knowledge-Based Protein Design
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ycVoWFqDTmAC&oi=fnd&pg=PA239&dq=info:jfUqS15rm4sJ:scholar.google.com&ots=OeqfyTb31i&sig=3LB-uyTyyg3Al87_64VqKDMWkqI#v=onepage&q&f=false

Using fundamental principles that have been discovered about protein structure and stability to inform protein design can lead to productive design efforts.

Michael A. Fisher

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