Emily Que

Emily Que graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2004 where she performed undergraduate research in bioinorganic chemistry and materials chemistry in the laboratories of Prof. Larry Que and Prof. Andreas Stein respectively. Her research interests took her to the University of California at Berkeley for graduate school where she worked for Prof. Chris Chang. There, Emily developed a series of Gd-based contrast agents for copper sensing applications. For her work in the Chang lab, she was awarded the ACS Division of Inorganic Chemistry Young Investigator Award in 2010. Emily then moved to Northwestern University, where she joined the labs of Prof. Tom O'Halloran (chemistry) and Prof. Teresa Woodruff (reproductive biology). There, she developed new imaging tools and methods for exploring how the mammalian egg utilizes zinc at the time of fertilization. This collaborative project involved close interactions with chemists, reproductive biologists, electron microscopists, and many scientists at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab.

Research in the Que lab lies at the interface of bioinorganic chemistry and chemical biology, with an emphasis on chemical synthesis of new molecular tools that will be characterized in the test tube and in biological settings ranging from isolated proteins, cell culture, and whole organisms. Two major areas of the lab include the development of chemical tools to probe cellular metal homeostasis and the development of novel MRI contrast agents for molecular imaging.