Bio

Jennifer J. Ottesen received her B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Chicago, where she worked on the development of transition metal catalysts in the laboratory of Lawrence Sita. She was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow studying with Barbara Imperiali at Caltech and MIT, and received her Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry in 2001 for work developing discretely folded mini-protein motifs.  She was a Merck Postdoctoral Fellow in the Laboratory of Synthetic Protein Chemistry at The Rockefeller University, studying with Tom Muir to apply synthetic peptide and protein chemistry with a particular focus on the role of phosphorylation in dynamic regulation of Crk-II and Smad2. She joined the faculty of OSU in 2005 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, and was promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry in 2012. She is a member of the Ohio State Biochemistry Program (OSBP), Biophysics, and the Chemistry & Biology Interface Training Program (CBIP).  She received the Dean’s Award for Undergraduate Research Mentoring in 2008, and was awarded an NSF CAREER Award in 2009. 

Research Overview

Research in the Ottesen laboratory uses peptide and protein chemistry to address biological problems. The Ottesen group is developing improved techniques for solid and hybrid phase chemical ligation, which allows the rapid recombination of peptide elements into larger macromolecules. A primary direction for this research has been understanding the effect of histone post-translational modifications such as acetylation and phosphorylation in chromatin structure and function through the efficient generation of precisely modified semi-synthetic nucleosomes (Figure credit: Ryan Yu, Yu et al, Org. Biomol. Chem (2016)).