Erin Daly Receives ACS Fellowship

Fourth-year graduate student Erin M. Daly has received an American Chemical Society Division of Organic Chemistry Predoctoral Fellowship sponsored by Merck Research Laboratories. The award will support her studies with Prof. Richard Taylor’s research group, where she has been investigating the bioactive conformation of epothilones, a class of natural products that could be used to create cancer-fighting drugs.

“We work on natural products that are similar to Taxol, a known breast cancer drug,” Daly says. “Based on tools we have on hand, we can modify those natural products or try to modify them, so we understand more about the natural product and its mode of action or increase its activity.”

Her research for the remainder of her graduate career will be directed more toward biochemical research with polyketide synthases. “The focus is going to be not in traditional synthetic organic chemistry,” she says. “It’s going to be more at the interface of biology and chemistry.”

Daly, who is from Stratford, Conn., graduated in 2005 summa cum laude from Fairfield University in Chemistry with a Biochemistry concentration and a Mathematics minor. She won a Lilly Fellowship to study Organic Chemistry at Notre Dame. Taylor’s group includes five graduate students, one post-doc and four undergraduate students.