Assistant Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry

Mike obtained his B.A. in Chemistry from Pomona College, where he studied the regiospecificity of metalloenzymes with Professor Matthew Sazinsky. He then spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar in Professor Wolfgang Sippl’s lab at Martin Luther Universität in Germany, using computational techniques to search for selective inhibitors of histone deacetylases. As an NSF Graduate Fellow with Professor James Berger at UC Berkeley, he employed structural and biochemical techniques to determine how the bacterial transcription termination factor Rho is controlled by nucleic acids, small molecules, and dissociable protein cofactors. As an A.P. Giannini and K99/R00 Postdoctoral Fellow with Professor Joseph Puglisi at Stanford, he used an in vitro-reconstituted translation system and single-molecule assays to uncover the basis of speed and fidelity in eukaryotic translation termination. Mike joined the UCLA faculty in 2023.