Dr. Anne Kenworthy,
Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee
Dr. Kenworthy received her Ph.D. in Cell Biology in 1994 from Duke University. Following postdoctoral training with Dr. Michael Edidin at The Johns Hopkins University, she joined the laboratory of Dr. Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz at the National Institutes of Health for additional training as an NRC Fellow. She will join the faculty in the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine as an assistant professor in November 2001. Her research interests are the membrane organization, dynamics and intracellular trafficking of lipid-modified proteins. She has used a quantitative FRET microscopy assay to detect lipid rafts in cell membranes. Based on acceptor photobleaching, this FRET assay can be used successfully with conventional fluorophores such as Cy3 and Cy5 as well as spectral variants of the Green Fluorescent Protein. She also has developed a method based on the theory of 2-dimensional FRET to evaluate the lateral organization (random versus clustered) of proteins in cell membranes.