The failing heart is energy-deprived despite an abundance of substrates, whereas cancer cells exploit metabolic pathways to redirect energy transfer to promote its growth at the expense of healthy tissue. At the Energy Transfer and Metabolism Lab, we seek to unravel how humans and other organisms optimize production of the metabolic fuel adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which powers every cell in our body. Specifically, our lab aims to study the quantum physics of mitochondrial electron and proton transport.


We hypothesize that an organism's evolved, or otherwise mutated, electron transfer system components play key roles in determining its distinct temperature profile for mitochondrial ATP production. We also study methods for ‘re-energizing’ energy-deprived organs, including highly innovative techniques such as transfer of functional healthy mitochondria into energy-altered tissue like the failing cardiomyocyte or growing neoplastic cells.