Alisha Contractor, PhD

Alisha was a postdoctoral fellow at Seattle Children’s Research Institute at the Center for Global infectious Disease Research. Here, she worked on the synthesis and characterization of novel tuberculosis therapeutics and development of small-molecule probes for elucidating disease mechanisms.

Alisha received her PhD in chemical biology from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation focused on the synthesis and delivery of novel small molecule dyes with enhanced stability and increased tissue penetration for neuronal activity imaging. While pursuing her PhD, she worked as a graduate research assistant working on synthesizing dyes that facilitate imaging activity past the surface of brain tissue with the goal of utilizing these dyes to study how communication between circuits in the brain result in various functions like retinal processing and disease pathogenesis. Alisha received her bachelor of science in chemistry from the University of West Georgia. While there, she was an undergraduate research assistant for multiple principal investigators. Her research spanned multiple areas of focus including the synthesis and analysis of a small molecule receptor: PAIn for transporting ion-pairs across cell membranes, the cooperative ion-pair binding studies of synthetic and naturally occurring ion-pair receptors, and the biological characterization of new photosynthetic mutants of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.

• “Imaging Ca2+ with a Fluorescent Rhodol,” first author, American Chemical Society
• “The crystal structure of a valinomycin•2Ca2+ complex and the multi-step solution equilibria in acetonitrile characterised by 1H NMR, UV–Vis, and mass spectrometry,” first author, Supramolecular Chemistry