Keriann M. Backus

Keriann M. Backus is an Associate Professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), with a joint appointment in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Her research focuses on chemical proteomics, cysteine and lysine profiling, and immunomodulatory agents for cancer, infectious, and autoimmune diseases.

• Education: B.S. in Chemistry and B.A. in Latin American Studies from Brown University (2007), Ph.D. from Oxford University and NIH (2012)

Research Interests: She develops chemical tools to study immune system modulation, targeting proteins via small molecules and antibodies. Her work integrates chemical proteomics, activity-based protein profiling (ABPP), and redox biology to explore cell-surface proteomes and inflammation-responsive mitochondrial redoxomes.

Article Trends: Recent publications emphasize cysteine chemoproteomics, SP3-FAIMS technology for high-throughput profiling, covalent drug discovery for proteoform-selective inhibitors, proximity labeling for lipid interactomes, and data integration via CysDB. These reflect her expertise in redox-sensitive cysteine mapping and covalent fragment-based screening.

• Scientific Awards:
  • W.M. Keck Foundation Grant (2024)
  • Ono Breakthrough Science Initiative Award (2023)
  • NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2021)
  • Packard Fellowship (2020)
  • DARPA Young Faculty Award (2019)
  • Beckman Young Investigator (2019)
  • Rhodes Scholar (2007)
  • NIH Oxford Cambridge Scholar (2007)

Advising & Grants: Dr. Backus has secured major grants including the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and Packard Fellowship. She co-corresponded studies on multi-omic data integration and mentored students in covalent drug discovery and chemoproteomic method development.