Keriann Backus

Keriann M. Backus, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry and Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA. Dr. Backus began her scientific career at Brown University, where she received a B.S. in Chemistry and B.A. in Latin American Studies in 2007. As a 2007 Rhodes Scholar and an NIH Oxford Cambridge Scholar, her Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry was conducted jointly in the laboratories of Benjamin Davis (The University of Oxford, Oxford, UK) and Clifton Barry (NIH, NIAID, Bethesda, Md). In 2012 Dr. Backus completed her doctorate and began an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in the laboratory of Prof. Benjamin Cravatt. Dr. Backus's research merges the fields of chemical biology, genomics, and proteomics to develop new chemical tools to study and alter the functions of disease-linked proteins.