Dr. Jessica Hollenbeck received a B.S. degree from the University of Michigan where she completed an Honors thesis with Prof. Peter Toogood on the synthesis of the natural product althiomycin. She attended graduate school here at IU working with Prof. Martha Oakley in the Department of Chemistry. Her dissertation was on the design and synthesis of a class of proteins called antiparallel coiled coils.
During graduate school, Dr. Hollenbeck became interested in the growing field of chemical biology. This led her to the University of Wisconsin where she worked as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. Laura Kiessling. In Prof. Kiessling’s lab, she worked on a team studying synthetic polymers designed to control signal transduction pathways in B cells.
Dr. Hollenbeck began her independent career at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX where she taught organic chemistry and biochemistry and did research with undergraduate students using ankyrin repeat proteins as multivalent ligand scaffolds. Since returning to IU in 2021, she has focused on improving outcomes in undergraduate biochemistry courses using active learning strategies tailored to large enrollment classes.