Welcome Luke!

We are excited to announce that Luke Akin has joined the Chan Lab!

Brief bio: Luke is a recent graduate from The University of Texas at Austin where he double majored in Chemistry and Biochemistry. His earliest work used recombinant approaches to study spliceosome activity, but he quickly expanded his research portfolio after an internship with Bayer constructing small molecule libraries and a fellowship at the Mayo Clinic studying metalloproteinase involvement in pancreatic cancer. While still at UT, Luke joined a mass spectrometry lab studying macromolecular structures using photodissociation-based methods and also carried out small molecule work between labs at MIT and Harvard as a 2015 Amgen Scholar. Post-graduation, Luke worked in industry developing DNA sequencing technology and now plans to pursue his PhD in Chemical Biology here at UIUC.