Jesse Hudspeth, awarded a Fulbright scholarship, will be working primarily at the Medical University of Innsbruck in Austria under the direction of Dr. Bernhard Rupp. He will also conduct research at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology in Jena, Germany under the direction of Dr. Dirk Hoffmeister. He will be structurally and biochemically characterizing proteins from psychedelic mushrooms that biosynthesize psilocybin and other psychoactive alkaloids, namely the PsiM protein from the mushroom species Psilocybe cubensis. This will yield fundamental insight into the specificity of these proteins for their substrates and open the possibility of genetically modifying these proteins to synthesize a plethora of psilocybin derivatives for therapeutic use. This fits into Jesse’s PhD work at Mines in the Morrison research group, which is focused on characterizing essential proteins in pathogenic bacteria to develop novel antibacterial agents as therapeutic strategies.