2001 IOTA SIGMA PI ANNA LOUISE HOFFMAN AWARD FOR
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN GRADUATE RESEARCH

Ekaterina Pletneva, Iowa State University

Ekaterina was nominated by Dr. Patricia Thiel, Chair of the Chemistry Department. Ekaterina’s research is directed at understanding the nature of docking interactions between electron-transferring proteins. She uses both theoretical and experimental approaches to understand the factors that determine a particular configuration of the electron-transfer complex. According to her advisor, Professor Nenad Kostic: "Kate designed clever kinetic experiments and critically compared several theories of electrostatic interactions in her thorough analysis of the dependence of the rate constant on ionic strength." Her first publication in the most selective bioinorganic journal is essentially her own. Her coauthors added relatively little to it. Her paper on protein docking and gated electrontransfer reactions between zinc cytochrome c and the new plastocyanin from the fern Dryopteris crassirhizoma, published in Journal of American Chemical Society, received glowing reviews and was published in record time, almost without changes. Professor Kostic regarded Kate as working in a manner of a young professor and that he "never had a graduate student or postdoc whose abilities and achievements, taken as a whole, exceeded Kate’s." Professor Amy Andreotti commented that Kate was the most independent and thoughtful young scientist that she have had the pleasure of working with. In addition to the Anna Louise Hoffman Award, Ekaterina has received the Soros Stdent Fellowship, the Arthur P. Hellwig Award and the Dow Fellowship.

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