Megan A. Macnaughtan is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at Louisiana State University.  She received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Ohio University in 1998, and her Ph.D. in analytical chemistry in 2003 from Purdue University.  She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center at the University of Georgia with James Prestegard before joining the faculty at Louisiana State University in 2008.  Dr. Macnaughtan is an expert in bioanalytical nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy.  As a graduate student with Dr. Daniel Raftery, she studied surface photo-catalysis using solid-state NMR and developed NMR probes for multiplex sample analysis.  Her postdoctoral research in the Prestegard lab focused on biological NMR, including method development and structural biology of proteins and carbohydrate ligands.  Her work on post-expression isotopic labeling of proteins for characterizing glycoproteins was supported by an NIH Pathway to Independence grant.  As an assistant professor, Dr. Macnaughtan’s research group investigates the structural conformations of proteins, carbohydrates, and enzyme-bound substrate using NMR.  Her research program is focused on three areas: developing an E. coli strain to produce glycoproteins suitable for study by NMR, investigating the mechanism of Notch activation by NMR, and determining the structure-activity relationship of a bi-functional Chlamydia trachomatis enzyme.