Erome Daniel

Dr. Hankore is a Pathway to Faculty Fellow at Wayne State University’s chemistry department. She earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln after training in chemical biology and biocatalysis in Prof. Jiantao Guo‘s lab. She then transitioned to the University of Kentucky (UK) to study enediyne biosynthesis as a joint postdoc with professors Steven Van Lanen and Jon Thorson. She subsequently joined Dr. Joe Chappell’s lab, where she collaborated with computational chemists in Dr. Chang-Guo Zhan group to engineer triterpene synthases and elucidate their mechanism.

During her postdoc tenure, Dr. Hankore worked as an Office of Technology and Commercialization (OTC) Fellow at UK, and served as a postdoc liaison to the Graduate Student Congress. She was also president of the Society of Postdoctoral Scholars (SOPS) from 2021-2022.

Her research interests include chemical biology, protein engineering, biocatalysis, bioorganic chemistry, and natural products. Beyond her academic pursuits, Dr. Hankore is an astronomy enthusiast and enjoys hiking, writing, and music.

Ph.D., University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Department of Chemistry

Developing peptide sensors for kinases with associated with metastasis in cancers.

Unnatural amino acid incorporation and quadruplet codon decoding.

Investigating the anti-cancer properties of an indium porphyrin compounds    

Biocatalysis with carboxylic acid reductases for biofuel production

Repurposing photoactive yellow protein (PYP) as a small molecule biosensor  

Postdoctoral Research Scholar, University of Kentucky, Pharmaceutical Sciences

Evolving the catalytic efficiency of triterpene synthases

Elucidating the biosynthesis of antibacterial and anti-cancer compounds

Structural and functional studies on enediyne thioesterases

• Bhardwaj, M., Cui, Z., Hankore, E.D., Moonschix, F.H., Esfahani, H.S., Phillips, G., Thorson, J.S., Shen, B., Van Lane, S.G. Polyketide origin of the dyine-containing carbocycle and anthraquinone of enediynes. PNAS. 2023, 120, e2220468120
• Kramer, L.; Le, X.; Hankore, E. D.; Wilson, A. M.; Guo, J.; Niu, W. Engineering and Characterization of Hybrid Carboxylic Acid Reductases. Journal of Biotechnology. 2019, 304, 52-56. 
• Hankore, E. D., Zhang, L., Chen, Y. Genetic incorporation of noncanonical amino acids using two mutually orthogonal quadruplet codons. ACS Synthetic Biology. 2019, 8, 1168-1174.
• Kramer, L.*; Hankore, E. D.*; Liu, Y.; Liu, K.; Jimenez, E.; Guo, J.; Niu, W. “Characterization of Carboxylic Acid Reductases for Biocatalytic Synthesis of Industrial Chemicals.” ChemBioChem 2018, 19, 1452-1460.  
• Kelly, M. I., Betchel, T. J., R eddy, D. R., Hankore, E. D., Beck, J. R., Stains, C. I. “A Real-time, Fluorescence-based Assay for Rho-associated Protein Kinase Activity.” Analytica Chimica Acta, 2015, 891, 284-290. 

OTC Fellow

Working with the Office of Technology and Commercialization (OTC) to commercialize the inventions of University of Kentucky Researchers.

President of the Society of Postdoctoral Scholars (SOPS)

Leading SOPS and working alongside the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs to serve postdocs across the UK campus through planning professional and personal development events, including the 2022 annual day-long symposium for postdocs.

Teaching

Experience teaching introductory and organic chemistry labs, recitations, and training undergraduate and graduate research students.

Watch a recent interview I did with Rep. Charles Booker here. This civic engagement event was hosted by the Graduate Student Congress (GSC) at the University of Kentucky.

Watch my talk on Vaccine Research and Approval at the 2021 Bost Health Policy Forum.

The Society of Postdoctoral Scholars (SOPS) at UK recently hosted Professor Carl Bergstrom. You can watch his talk on Fighting the Misinfodemic here.