Biochemistry Graduate Program

Megan Thielges received her B.S. (summa cum laude) at Arizona State University (Tempe, AZ) in 2003. She was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship for training in biophysics at The Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, CA) where she earned a Ph.D. under the direction of Professor Floyd E. Romesberg in 2009. She went on to a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Institutes of Health funded postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Michael D. Fayer at Stanford University. She joined the faculty at IU in the summer of 2012.

Her research focuses on applying and further developing linear and multidimensional infrared spectroscopy in combination with chemical and biological methods for site-selective protein labeling toward understanding biological systems. An interdisciplinary approach is used to generate residue-specific descriptions of the structural dynamics of proteins, delineate their contributions to function, and assess the role of dynamics in protein evolution. A central interest of the group is biological molecular recognition, and how dynamics might tailor the specificity of protein binding, for instance involving electron transfer proteins, cytochrome P450s, and Src homology 3 domains.