The Barad lab specializes in cellular cryo-electron tomography (CryoET), a microscopy technique that captures pristine three-dimensional snapshots of the cellular environment at unprecedented resolution without the need for chemical fixation or labeling, revealing membranes, filaments, and protein complexes in their native state. CryoET has the potential to connect protein structural biology with sub-cellular localization and morphology within a single experiment; we develop computational tools to connect and contextualize these different scales of biological organization. We use cryoET and these new computational tools to understand how mammalian cells remodel themselves in response to intracellular bacterial infection. Bacteria are masterful manipulators of mammalian cells, and by learning how bacterial effector proteins drive large scale cellular reorganization, we aim to reveal the underlying regulatory mechanisms for cellular architecture.

Prior to founding the Barad lab at OHSU in 2024, Dr. Barad earned his Ph.D. in Biophysics with Dr. James Fraser at UCSF in 2019, where he developed software for analyzing results from structural biology experiments ranging from single particle cryoEM to small-angle x-ray scattering, as well as studying the mechanisms of the processive enzyme acidic mammalian chitinase. He spent a short stint at Genentech, where he worked with Dr. Alexis Rohou and developed software for on-the-fly processing of cryoEM data, then completed his postdoctoral training with Dr. Danielle Grotjahn at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, where he studied mechanisms of mitochondrial remodeling in health and disease using cryo-electron tomography.