Hannah Shafaat

Biography

 Hannah Shafaat received her B.S. in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2006, where she performed research on spectroscopic endospore viability assays with Adrian Ponce (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and Harry Gray. She received her Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 2011, under the direction of Professor Judy Kim, as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow. During her graduate research, she used many different types of spectroscopy to study the structure and dynamics of amino acid radical intermediates in biological electron transfer reactions. After earning her Ph.D., Hannah moved across the ocean to Germany to study hydrogenase proteins and learn advanced EPR techniques as a Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow working under Director Wolfgang Lubitz at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion (formerly Bioinorganic Chemistry). Hannah joined The Ohio State University Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in August 2013.

Research Interest

 Her research centers on the study of metalloenzymes that carry out valuable reactions relevant to alternative energy sources and clean energy storage. Using nature as inspiration, they seek to harness the advantages of bioinorganic platforms while overcoming the limitations of fragile multimeric protein systems. Her projects utilize a diverse array of scientific tools, from wet chemistry— molecular biology, chemical synthesis, and metalloprotein design—to spectroscopy—steady state and time-resolved optical techniques along with visible and ultraviolet resonance Raman spectroscopy—to quantum chemical calculations. Obtaining molecular-level insight into the mechanisms of catalysis will guide our design of increasingly efficient and robust catalysts for application.