Natalie R. Gassman, Ph.D.

Associate Director for Access, Belonging and Culture

Natalie Gassman received a B.A. in chemistry from Michigan State University, and she earned a Ph.D. from the University of California Los Angeles in chemistry. She held post-doctorate positions at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Her postdoctoral training focused on the role of DNA repair in response to environmental exposures and how modulated DNA repair machinery contributes to cancer development.

As an associate professor of pathology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham – with joint appointments in Nutrition Sciences and at the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center – her work focuses on characterizing the influence environmental exposures have on DNA repair and characterizing how DNA repair proteins are altered or modified in the context of cancer. She has also developed a versatile detection method that helps identify deficiencies in repair mechanisms that give cancer cells a survival edge and hopes that these results can be applied in a clinical setting to tailor therapies for cancer patients.