Melissa Lambeth Kemp

Dr. Kemp serves as the Research Director for the NSF-funded Engineering Research Center in Cell Manufacturing Technologies and as the Deputy Director of the Marcus Center of Excellence in Cell Biomanufacturing. Her research program is focused on understanding how metabolism influences the decisions that cells make. Aging, stem cell differentiation, cancer metastasis, and inflammation rely on progressive changes in metabolism resulting in increased levels of reactive oxygen species.  The accumulation of these molecules is known as cellular oxidation, and pathological levels are referred to as oxidative stress. The Kemp lab develops systems biology tools for investigating how cellular oxidation influences cellular fate and interpretation of cues from the extracellular environment. Through multicellular simulations, Dr. Kemp's research group investigates the collective behavior that arises during stem cell differentiation, immune cell responses, or drug treatments from metabolic diversity in individual cells. Because of the numerous biochemical reactions involved, the Kemp lab develops computational models and analytical approaches to understand how complex protein network properties are influenced by redox-sensitive proteins; these proteins typically have reactive thiol groups that are post-translationally regulated in the presence of reactive oxygen species to alter activity and/or function. Experimentally, Dr. Kemp's research group also develops novel high-throughput single cell techniques for the detection and quantification of intracellular oxidation.