Mercedes Fisk

My background includes being born in Nebraska, but moved to Texas when I was 5.

During high school I was dual enrolled in Ranger College working towards my associate’s degree in science, which I received a year after graduating from high school.

I started undergrad in fall of 2015 in Wichita Falls, Texas, at Midwestern State University as a pre-med student majoring in biology with a minor in chemistry. I graduated with my bachelor’s degree in 2018 and began a gap in education to study for the MCAT, get married and join the workforce once again.

During this gap I found that a direct admit to medical school might not be for me. I searched for PhD programs and master's programs across the country to find a program that would allow me to try a few new options besides medical school but with the mindset to keep that option open.

UB stood out to me because I could sample different disciplines and labs to determine where I might fit in the world of research, who would support me with a stipend financially, and where I could find kind mentors — intellectually and emotionally.

Knowing I wanted to attend UB, I put in a transfer at work — which at the time was Home Depot — to move from Brownwood, Texas, to Buffalo, New York. We moved in the middle of 2020, and I immediately began my application to UB.

Although I did not receive an acceptance letter into the PhD program here at UB, I did receive an acceptance letter into the Natural Sciences Interdisciplinary Master’s program here at UB. In 2021, I began my master’s at UB and in the first semester found out how excited research made me, so I requested to join a lab earlier than the program required for my final project.

I found Dr. Gulick’s lab by taking a special interest in an article that we presented in journal club, which preceded his work on a natural product called tilimycin/tilivalline and the appeal of visualizing molecules to learn fine details of an enzyme's structure and role.

I spent a year in his lab falling in love with structural biology and becoming even more determined to complete my PhD and join the enzymologist community as a scientist myself. At the end of my master’s degree, I inquired about joining the lab as a PhD student and was offered the position to start immediately after completing the master’s program.

As I near the end of my PhD with a graduation date of spring/summer 2026, I am grateful to the faculty members who have helped me navigate this phase in my life with support and have pushed me to become the scientist I am today with integrity, hard work, and encouragement to think outside the box.

This program has been exceptional in its ability to allow me to find my place in science and in research with such a wide range of possibilities in labs and in classes.

When it comes to living in Buffalo, it has been incredible.

Each season in Buffalo is gorgeous and full of fun activities to take up in your free time: ice skating and hockey games in the winter, blooming cherry blossom trees and museums in the spring, hiking the trails at Niagara Falls or river rafting at Letchworth State Park in the summer, catching a concert or visiting the botanical gardens in the fall, to name a few.

To briefly describe my research, I am currently working to delineate a novel pathway towards the natural product called nocardichelin. Nocardichelin is a siderophore which is a metal (often iron) chelating small molecule. Siderophores are typically created through nonribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPS) or NRPS independent siderophore synthetases, but nocardichelin has structural elements to support modular NRPS and NIS cooperation.

My first goal in delineating this pathway is to assist in determining these unusual enzyme mechanisms, including those with the capabilities to connect NRPS and NIS systems, to help shed light on similar enzymes and pathways.

My second and overarching goal of this project is to characterize these enzymes structurally and functionally so that we may open the door to engineering the pathway to incorporate stealthy antibiotics that can be delivered to specific microbial pathogens.

With these two goals in mind, I am excited to open a new route towards fighting antibiotic resistance and to help uncover similar and new enzyme mechanisms that may play different roles in global health and in science.