Aditya’s research award is for his studies to understand how to make fluoride a more potent antimicrobial for the dental pathogen Streptococcus mutans. This photo is from the awards luncheon, with the IADR President, Prof. Pamela Yelick, and the Vice President and Chief Dental Officer of Colgate, Dr. Maria Ryan.

A big congratulations to Trevor Yeh, Carla Peralta, and Chia-Yu Kang for their successful PhD dissertation defenses during the month of March. They did the lab proud with three exciting and very different projects!

In the span of about 2 hours today, Aditya’s paper on fluoride-induced lysis in Streptococcus mutans was published in PNAS, Chia-Yu’s paper on the structure of the eukaryotic fluoride exporter FEX was published in Nature Communications, and Aditya was awarded the American Heart Association postdoctoral fellowship. Congratulations to all members of the team who contributed

Jordan joins us from the University of Wellington, New Zealand, and Saikat was most recently at Michigan State University. Welcome!

A big thank you to Cristina Paulino and the Paulino lab for hosting my sabbatical and sharing all the secrets of cryo-EM. Thanks also to Heidelberg University and the Alexander von Humboldt foundation for funding my stay and research project in Germany!

Rachael was named the 2025 graduate student Cranefield awardee by the Society of General Physiologists for her paper “Transport of metformin metabolites by guanidinium exporters of the small multi drug resistance family.” This award recognizes an outstanding paper published in the Journal of General Physiology. Really well-deserved, Rachael!

The Stockbridge lab was well represented at the MCDB Department retreat by our undergraduate contingent. Congratulations to Minjun for winning a Best Poster award!

We have several open positions for postdocs, graduate students, and staff funded by the NIH/NIGMS grant “Structural and functional analysis of novel microbial membrane proteins,” the NIH/NIDCR grant “A multi scale approach to develop and apply fluoride efflux inhibitors to reverse oral dysbiosis and eliminate early childhood caries,” and the NSF grant “Molecular evolution of

In an effort led by our recent PhD graduate Olive Burata, and with assists from undergraduates Ever O’Donnell, Josh Hyun, and Ethan Gibbs and graduate student Rachael Lucero, we identified the necessary and sufficient residues for antiseptic transport by the Small Multidrug Resistance transporters.

Co-written with collaborator Larry Wackett at the University of Minnesota, this piece considers how ancient fluoride physiologies might be harnessed to support the bioremediation of fluorinated wastes like PFAS.