Owen Leiser is a PhD student in the microbiology program in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He is currently studying the degradation of misassembled outer membrane proteins in the presence of YfgC, a periplasmic metalloprotease. Additionally, he has been studying the heat and antibiotic resistance phenotypes of Escherichia coli cells lacking DegP, another periplasmic protease and YfgL, a membrane-bound protein involved in membrane biogenesis.