January 27, 2021 |
Erica L.-W. Majumder joined the UW–Madison faculty in January 2021 as an assistant professor in the Department of Bacteriology.
What is your hometown? Where did you grow up?
I’m from St. Louis, Missouri, and happy to be back in the Midwest.
What is your educational/professional background, including your previous position?
I’m a chemist by training and throughout my training and career have become more and more enamored with the chemistry that microorganisms do and produce. I did my undergraduate at a liberal arts college called Drury University and studied chemistry, math, physics and Spanish. What I liked most was that everyone had to minor in Global Studies which encouraged me to think about the societal and philosophical implications of the scientific work I do. I earned my Ph.D. in bioinorganic chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) working with Bob Blankenship on mechanisms of energy conversion and conservation in photosynthesis. In my postdoc, I was working in a systems biology context to decipher metal-microbe interactions in nuclear waste contaminated environments from a microbial physiology and genetics standpoint with Judy Wall at the University of Missouri-Columbia and metabolomics with Gary Siuzdak at The Scripps Research Institute. In August of 2019, I started my lab at SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry [in Syracuse, NY], and we began research efforts on microbe-plastic interactions. However, when the opportunity to come to UW–Madison opened up, my lab and I jumped at it.