Collin Bachert

How do you write a blurb to describe oneself in what amounts to a tweet? It seems such a daunting exercise, not because of the limitations of the number of words for, indeed, there is such a thing as haiku, but because of the limitations of words themselves on paper. Collin is…not even Collin, that name given to me by my oppressors. Even that attached image is insufficient for that body you see is not me. “I” am the collage of everything that has come before me (people, books, institutions…) and the pregnant potential of all that will come after… but then who isn’t, right? “I” am a poem, indescribable by its very nature. “I” am someone that must be experienced to be known (in the most limited of capacities). But to fulfill this task at hand, I am a “Queer/n,” a multidisciplinary scientist, a writer, a cook, an aquarist and plant nerd who enjoys all these things alongside baseball and art too. How about you?

Steffi Hedayati

My current research focuses on the function of intrinsically disordered regions of select ribosome assembly factors. We seek to understand their contribution in the timing of releasing pre-ribosomes from the nucleolus to the nucleoplasm. How do pre-ribosomes “know” when it’s time to move on to the next step in their life and who allows them to move on?

I was a microbiology major in my undergrad and studied biofilm formation of Shewanella oneidensis. For my grad work, I switched to yeast and a very different field: protein folding and quality control. Post-translational protein quality control had been very well established for cytoplasmic proteins and proteins going through the secretory pathway, but not much was known how cells handle nascent proteins that misfold or pose other challenges during their translation. I subsequently worked in the biotech industry on inflammation and cell death pathways, and eventually transitioned back to academia, first in a teaching role and now back as a Research Associate. I am very excited to work on the ribosome again!

A lot of my free time is dedicated to my two little kids but during my kid-free time I enjoy knitting, video games and a good TV show or movie with my husband.