Associate Professor, Dr. Daniel Slade, is now the acting Graduate Program Chair for the Department of Biochemistry. In this new role, Slade will supervise and coordinate the administration and governance of graduate studies within the graduate program, serve as a point of contact for graduate students enrolled in the program, and lead the recruiting efforts to find the next talented cohort of biochemists.

Slade joined the department in August 2014 and will be starting his eighth year this semester. Since he began working in the department, he has taught multiple courses including general biochemistry, protein structure and function, and advanced applications of molecular life sciences and acted as a research mentor for many graduate and undergraduate students working in his lab. The Slade Lab investigates how bacteria influences the tumor microenvironment and Slade and his team of researchers recently discovered that mouth bacterium may cause colon cancer to spread. This finding was covered by several media outlets and Slade was interviewed by local news station WDBJ7 to explain how poor oral hygiene could cause the bacteria, Fusobacterium nucleatum, to migrate to other parts of the body where this bacterium can negatively affect cancer patient outcomes.

Over his time in the department, Slade has received grants from institutions like the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Virginia Tech Center for Drug Discovery (VTCDD), and the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Sciences (ICTAS). His work has been published in several high-impact journals and magazines, including Trends in Cancer, ACS Infectious Diseases, EBioMedicine Journal, and Science Signaling, where his lab’s paper on the role of bacteria in metastasis was used as the cover article. Slade has also been invited to give research talks at conferences and universities throughout the world including in China, Europe, and the United States.

Slade received his Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Wofford College in 2002 then received a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of South Carolina in 2007. He was an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in the Division of Infectious Diseases from 2008-2011. He worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida for three years prior to joining the department.

Written by Cameron Warren

Related Articles: