Dana A. Baum

Present Position

Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chemistry Graduate Program Coordinator, Saint Louis University

Chapter Affiliation

Saint Louis University

Dr. Dana A. Baum earned her B.A. in Chemistry with a concentration in Biochemistry from Washington University in St. Louis (cum laude). Upon completing her Bachelor’s degree, she worked on the Human Genome Project at the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University School of Medicine, initially as a lab technician and later as senior lab technician. She then pursued graduate studies at the University of Kentucky, where her research focused on catalytic RNA (ribozymes). After earning her Ph.D. in Chemistry, Dr. Baum moved to a postdoctoral position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Baum was awarded a Kirchstein-NRSA NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship to support her research on catalytic DNA (deoxyribozymes). She started her independent career as an Assistant Professor in Chemistry at Saint Louis University in 2008 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2014. She has served at the Chemistry Graduate Program Coordinator since 2015. Dr. Baum’s research on functional nucleic acids has resulted in several publications and presentations at regional, national, and international meetings and has been supported by NIH and NASA. She also actively reviews for journals over a broad range of disciplines and several funding agencies, including NIH, NSF, and NASA.