A co-op and a path shift

As the semester wound down on her analytical chemistry course, a representative from the co-op program addressed the class, encouraging students to apply for chemical company co-ops as they now possessed the skills employers were seeking. Kraft inquired about openings, hoping she could land an interesting part-time job and abandon working retail for the remainder of her college days. But only co-ops were offered, which would have meant delaying her graduation, so she discarded the idea. 

A conversation with her uncle caused her to reverse course. He pointed out that even though it meant delaying graduation, the co-op was a great opportunity to work in a field that interested her and to also build her skills. Which turned out to be true; Kraft’s co-op experience reinforced her desire to do chemistry, “but like I said, I was too far along to want to switch majors, so I stayed with biochemistry.”

PhD opens a path to engineering

Kraft confesses she’d never really thought about Ph.D. degrees, not what they were or who had them or what they meant. But during her co-op days she noticed those with Ph.D.’s seldom were the worker bees getting their hands dirty, and it dawned on her that a Ph.D. in chemistry would give her the skills and the credentials for the job security she craved while also allowing her to avoid more menial jobs. 

Although her co-op company asked her to pursue a job with them after graduation, “they never actually offered me a job, just said I could apply for openings. But I wasn’t going to have a degree in chemistry. As a child, I’d already seen through the late 1980’s layoffs how hard it could be for people to get a job—or advance and then hang onto the job—if you didn’t have the credentials to back it up. And that’s how I ended up at UIUC, earning my Ph.D. in chemistry,” she said. 

“Which posed another situation for me when I went looking for faculty positions. My significant other was a UIUC professor, so I wanted to be here, too, but it’s rare for the department to hire their own grads. However, chemical engineering offered me a position, and that’s how I came to be an engineer.”

An accomplished engineer who leads her own research team.

Research Accomplishments

The Kraft Group combines engineering principles and cutting-edge imaging technologies to overcome barriers to progress in biomedical research, developing new approaches in which compositional signatures acquired from individual cells are used to understand and predict biological function.

One such approach was for imaging metabolically incorporated, stable isotopelabeled cholesterol and sphingolipids in the plasma membrane of cells that provided a completely new understanding of plasma membrane organization. Scientists commonly believed that changes in the abundances of just two components, sphingolipids and cholesterol, had a drastic effect on cellular function, but the mechanisms for this lipid-mediated cell (dys)function were poorly understood. This was partially due to a lack of methods to image cholesterol and sphingolipids in membranes without using fluorophores that may alter the lipid’s distribution and function. The Kraft Group overcame this obstacle by using high-resolution secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS).

Their work, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Journal of Biological Chemistry, established that the plasma membranes of fibroblast cells contain sphingolipid domains that are not enriched with cholesterol, but are dependent on the cytoskeleton. At first, Kraft says, the team thought they must be doing something wrong as their data wasn’t consistent with the community’s commonly believed hypothesis. Upon sharing their findings, they’ve since learned other researchers have seen similar results but discarded them as errors.

Researchers suspect cholesterol in cell membranes contributes to the acquisition and spread of flu virus, however, there’s still much to learn. It’s a focus of Kraft’s team. They are also extending this research to characterizing the microscale interactions that occur on the surfaces of algal cells when they interact with bacteria.

Another research focus is the body’s blood and immune cells, called hematopoietic cells, which are produced from the differentiation of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in the bone marrow. Identification of the combinations of biochemical and biophysical cues that direct HSCs to self-renew or differentiate into distinct cell lineages would permit expanding specific blood or immune cells ex vivo for the treatment of blood cell diseases. But researchers often have trouble accurately identifying on a small scale if a cell has differentiated.

Kraft’s team is working on refining a tool they developed to accurately determine differentiation. They’ve identified the method for applying it to specific types of samples and are now focused on simplifying the process so that lab workers can easily be trained on how to prepare and run samples and correctly read the results.

When she’s not teaching or in the lab, Kraft likes to spend her time birdwatching or gardening, growing both flowers and vegetables.