Caitlin Davis, PhD

Caitlin obtained her Ph.D. with Prof. Brian Dyer at Emory University in 2015. During that time, she developed and applied structurally-specific time-resolved infrared techniques to probe fast protein dynamics in vitro. From 2015-2019, Caitlin was a Center for the Physics of Living Cells Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. Martin Gruebele at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a postdoc, she developed an in vitro mimic of the intracellular environment on protein folding and stability, and also expanded the in-cell Fast Relaxation Imaging (FReI) technique to bimolecular reactions and whole organisms.

In 2020, Caitlin started her own lab at Yale University, where she currently investigates the mechanism and dynamics of protein and RNA interactions inside cells. To achieve this goal, her group uses a combination of time-resolved infrared and fluorescence spectral imaging at multiple scales, from in vitro to single cell to whole organism. This quantitative biophysical approach is used to address kinetic questions that require characterization in the complex, heterogenous environment of the cell. This includes phase-separated bio-condensates, pre-mRNA splicing, and "quinary" RNA interactions.