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Kasia Dubiel, Ph.D
(She/Her/Hers)
- Assistant Professor
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(585) 395-2785
kdubiel@brockport.edu
Office: Lennon Hall B 23
Office Hours:Fall 2023 Office Hours in B23 Lennon:
Monday 11:30 AM - 1:30 PM
Thursday 1 PM - 3 PM
Bio
Dr. Dubiel earned her PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin - Madison under the mentorship of Dr. James Keck. Her research combined the fields of Biochemistry, Structural Biology, and Molecular Biology to answer questions focused on bacterial DNA replication and repair proteins. She continued her training with a Postdoc at UMass Chan Medical School in Microbiology in the lab of Dr. Elizabeth Shank, researching a wide range of topics including chemical communication in bacterial coculture, microbial association between native and invasive species in the Galapagos Islands, and complex carbohydrate processing in soil bacteria. She joined the SUNY Brockport Faculty in 2023.
Education
Ph.D. in Biochemistry - University of Wisconsin - Madison, Madison WI 2019
B.S. in Molecular and Cellular Biology and B.S. in Chemistry - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL 2014
Courses Taught
BIO323: Microbiology
Research Interests
From deep sea thermal vents to the oral cavity, bacteria live in complex, multi-species communities. Within these diverse environments, bacteria must sense external signals and stressors while communicating with neighboring bacteria. To this end, bacteria synthesize and release a vast array of molecules into the environment that serve as cues to surrounding microbes. In tandem, microbes must then sense and respond to complex signals and alter their behavior accordingly. Such microbial and environmental response networks play key roles in shaping native microbial communities across environments. One major challenge in understanding bacterial signaling is to link environmentally and microbially produced cues to downstream microbial signal transduction pathways. My research bridges this gap, mixing microbiology (to determine how coculture alters bacterial behavior), genetics (to probe the critical components of signaling), and biochemistry (to identify the bacterial signal response to their environment). My work serves to (I) identify the biochemical mechanisms of bacterial environmental sensing and signal transduction, (II) determine critical signals that alter bacterial behavior in coculture and (III) probe the conservation of these processes across inter-species bacterial interactions. The long-term goal of my lab is to link specific environmental signals to their associated biochemical pathways and bacterial behavior.