I am interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms of antibiotic resistance, with a primary focus on β-lactamases—enzymes that play a central role in the global spread of resistance to β-lactam antibiotics. I study how these enzymes evolve under diverse selection pressures and adapt to modern antibiotic therapies. Broadly, my work is divided into two major themes: (1) mapping the evolutionary landscape of clinically relevant β-lactamases to understand how resistance emerges and adapts in response to current and next-generation antibiotics, and (2) discovering and characterizing novel β-lactamases of environmental origins to uncover the molecular mechanisms that drive their functional diversification and evolutionary potential. To address these questions, I integrate high-throughput experimental platforms including deep mutational scanning (DMS), massively parallelized gene synthesis, and next-generation sequencing. These molecular biology tools enable the exploration of large protein sequence spaces, providing key insights into how combinations of mutations and sequence motifs affect activity, specificity, and resistance phenotypes.

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