Nick Fisk joined the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering in the fall of 2008 as an assistant professor. Dr Fisk earned B.S degrees in Chemistry and Biochemistry from Penn State University and received a Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of Wisconsin. At Wisconsin Dr. Fisk’s research focused on understanding the fundamental forces involved in natural and non-natural polypeptide folding. Dr. Fisk developed model systems for the study of parallel beta-sheet secondary of structures in proteins; examined the folding of oligomers of non-natural beta amino acids primarily by NMR and used phage display to identify new packing arrangements in protein coiled coils. Before arriving at CSU, Dr. Fisk was an NIH postdoctoral research fellow at Caltech where he worked on developing methodology to visualize newly synthesized proteins via the biosynthetic incorporation of reactive non-natural amino acids

My research involves expanding the genetic code to include specifically reactive amino acids and using these types of non-natural amino acids to construct branched proteins and control the physical properties of protein assemblies.