Dr. Jonathan J Caguiat
Professor
Chemical & Biological Sciences
Ward Beecher Hall 3111
phone: (330) 941-2063
Bio
Dr. Jonathan Caguiat is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Youngstown State University (YSU). In 1987, He received his Bachelor’s degree in Molecular Biology from the University of Michigan and studied an ATPase enzyme found in spinach chloroplasts. In 1995, he earned his Ph.D. in Microbiology from Michigan State University where he studied selenite resistance in Enterobacter sp. YSU, a bacterial strain that was isolated from a heavy metal contaminated site in Oak Ridge, TN. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Georgia, he studied the protein, MerR, which regulates the expression of mercury resistance. In 2000, he worked for Pall Life Sciences in Ann Arbor, MI developing molecular biology applications for filtration products. Then, in 2001, he worked at New Target Technologies, a startup company that searched for drug targets to combat diabetes and obesity. He began teaching at YSU in 2004 and is using transposon mutagenesis to identify heavy metal resistance genes found in the multi-metal resistant bacterial strains, Stenotrophomonas maltophilia Oak Ridge strain 02 and Enterobacter sp. YSU.