Samuel Snyder

Samuel (Sam) Snyder is a Postdoctoral Appointee at Argonne National Laboratory in the Solar Energy Conversion Group and works on a project through the Center for Catalysis in Biomimetic Confinement (CCBC), an Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The CCBC focuses on discerning the nature of multistep reaction pathways confined within protein-based shells of bacterial microcompartments, and how the selectively permeable shells enable and optimize these processes. Sam’s work in the CCBC involves expression, purification, and assembly of numerous shell proteins to create engineered bacterial microcompartment (BMC) shells for use as a biological scaffold to encapsulate various synthetic molecular catalysts and photosensitizers for biohybrid photocatalysis.

Sam earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from Saint Louis University, during which his dissertation research was primarily focused on catalytic heme proteins. He characterized the structural properties in solution state of Mycobacterium tuberculosis proteins MhuD and CYP121 using resonance Raman spectroscopy. He has experience with protein expression and purification, as well as various biochemical techniques including catalytic activity assays, SDS-PAGE, protein-cofactor reconstitution, and anaerobic protein preparation/handling.