Flora Rutaganira, Ph.D., Joins the Beckman Center

Dr. Rutaganira uses choanoflagellates—the closest living single-celled relatives to animals—to study how assemblies of cells communicate with each other. Choanoflagellates rely on intercellular signaling to form complex colonies, and this organization of cells is thought to represent a precursor to animal multicellularity. Dr. Rutaganira applies chemical, genetic, and cell biological tools to probe choanoflagellate cell-cell communication, with implications for understanding not only cell signaling, but organismal evolution as well.

Dr. Rutaganira got her start in chemistry as an undergraduate student at the University of California, Davis, where she studied chemical inhibitors of bacterial cytoskeletal proteins in the lab of Jared Shaw, Ph.D. She obtained her Ph.D. in Chemical Biology at the University of California, San Francisco, under the mentorship of Kevan Shokat, Ph.D. With Dr. Shokat, Dr. Rutaganira developed chemical tools to probe signal transduction mechanisms in pathogens. She was then awarded a Hanna H. Gray Fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to work with Nicole King, Ph.D., of the University of California, Berkeley. As a fellow, Dr. Rutaganira applied her chemical biology training to develop new ways of studying cell-cell communication and revealing the molecules that are needed for choanoflagellates to signal.

Outside of the lab, Dr. Rutaganira has played an important role in advocacy for women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields, and is recognized for her excellence in mentorship.

“We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Rutaganira to our Stanford community as a new laboratory head and assistant professor,” says Aaron Straight, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Biochemistry.

Recruitment is ongoing for other faculty positions at the Beckman Center, in the departments of Biochemistry, Developmental Biology, and Molecular and Cellular Physiology.