Joshua and Isaiah Gober - Twin Ph.D.’s
Department faculty members were excited to have
twin brothers Joshua, on the left in the above im-
age, and Isaiah, to the right, Gober join us as grad-
uate students. They have graduated together since
kindergarten, always receiving highest honors and
adulations, so we had high hopes that they would
bring that same energy and enthusiasm to their
work here. We were not disappointed, as both of
them successfully defended the doctoral theses
earlier this year. only author other than myself,” she continues. Not
only that, “this and a second project of his result-
ed in two patent applications, and subsequently to
an NIH SBIR grant with a local company, Epicypher,”
she concludes proudly.
Both Isaiah and his twin brother, Joshua, “arrived
at UNC with with an impressive resume and a pas-
sion for chemistry,” says Professor Marcey Wa-
ters. She was thrilled when Isaiah chose to join her
group. “His goal was to advance our fundamental
work on molecular receptors for methylated lysine,
a post-translational modification implicated in a
number of diseases, into useful tools for sensing
these modifications,” she says. “Joshua was one of the first students to join my
group, says Professor Eric Brustad, “and he proved
to be a vital member of our team,” he continues.
“Joshua was highly creative and independent, and
though soft spoken, when Joshua talked science,
everyone listened,” comments Brustad.
“Due to both his creativity and tenaciousness, Isa-
iah successfully accomplished his goal in my group,
through a system of his own design,” comments
Professor Waters. “Not only did he develop the sen-
sor, he did the biological studies to demonstrate its
utility,” she says. “And his work lead to an impres-
sive first-author paper in JACS, with Isaiah as the
16 | CHEMISTRY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA
Isaiah graduated this summer and took a job with
CEM, a leading company in application of micro-
wave technology to peptide and pharmaceutical
chemistry based in Matthews, NC.
Joshua established an impressive program in the
Brustad lab, developing cytochrome P450 based
enzymes that carry out a non-natural carbene-me-
diated cyclopropanation reaction. Excitingly, he
showed that many enzymes are capable of carrying
out this reaction and that different protein scaffolds
provide routes for different diastereomeric prod-
ucts. In addition, he developed a general strategy
Continued on page 22
| CHEM.UNC.EDU