Steve Smith received his undergraduate degree from the University of Missouri, Columbia. His first job in science was working in a perinatal biology laboratory at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. The lab focused on hypoxic regulation of transport and cell death in the human placenta. Smith returned to the University of Missouri and earned his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in the laboratory of Judy Wall. Smith’s doctoral research focused on the genetics and enzymes responsible for microbial mercury methylation. His dissertation was titled “Protein Components of the Microbial Mercury Methylation Pathway.” Smith’s work employed mutational analysis to characterize functional domains of the newly identified HgcA and HgcB proteins integral for mercury methylation and led to his first-author publication, “Site-Directed Mutagenesis of HgcA and HgcB Reveals Amino Acid Residues Important for Mercury Methylation,” in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Smith presented this research at the International Conference on Mercury as a Global Pollutant in 2015 in Jeju, Korea. He is a co-author on numerous perinatal biology papers along with the Science paper that initially identified the hgcA and hgcB genes. Smith is currently working in Wall’s lab finishing a publication to identify methyl donors to the mercury methylation reaction. In his free time, he is an avid smallmouth bass fisherman on many of Missouri’s small rivers and streams.
Posted: July 2016
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