Patricia Legler

Dr. Legler is a biologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and concentrated in biochemistry while at Washington University in St. Louis. She then earned her Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology (BCMB) from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD. She received her graduate training in enzymology in the lab of Albert S. Mildvan.

Dr. Legler’s graduate work focused on enzyme mechanisms and the use of kinetic and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods to understand catalysis. Following her graduate education she acquired training in structural biology as a post-doctoral fellow in Marius Clore’s (NMR) and Wei Yang’s (X-ray crystallography) labs at the National Institutes of Health. She then began working for the U.S. Army as a research chemist with COL Charles B. Millard and used a combination of protein engineering, enzyme kinetics, and X-ray crystallography to modify human and bacterial enzymes into nerve agent bioscavengers, develop an engineered ricin vaccine and anti-infective enzyme for the treatment of anthrax.

In 2011, she moved to her current position at NRL where she continues to apply kinetic and structural methods to the development of therapeutic enzymes and small molecules for infectious diseases and chemical defense.