Candie Paulsen, PhD

I love exploring the unknown and the thrill and sense of accomplishment that comes with making the unknown familiar. This passion has inspired me to make significant transitions, both conceptually and with methodology, at every stage of my career. I purposefully choose research projects that serve to improve human health as well as stand to make fundamental discoveries of basic biology and physiology. Moreover, I thoroughly enjoy teaching, mentoring, and helping young scientists find the joy in science. As a graduate student with Kate Carroll at the University of Michigan and The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, FL, I studied redox regulation of signal transduction cascades important to cancer. As a postdoctoral fellow with David Julius at the University of California, San Francisco, I determined the first structures of an important pain receptor, TRPA1 by cryo-EM. In the Paulsen Lab, we combine my diverse trainings to take a multidisciplinary approach to understand how TRPA1 is regulated and dysregulated by novel natural variants and through protein-protein interactions. This work is carried out with an eye towards discovering what a pain receptor "sees" in a cellular context, how those molecules can modulate its activity basally, and how those interactions may be modified to contribute to the development of chronic pain/inflammation.