About

My background is in chemical biology: developing and using chemical tools to help solve intractable problems in biology. I got interested in studying infectious disease after living in Mozambique, while teaching in the peace corps, and seeing the ways “neglected tropical diseases” still ravage communities. My doctoral work at Oregon Heath & Science University was initially focused on synthesizing lipid probes to investigate how flaviviruses (dengue virus, Zika virus) manipulate and require host lipid metabolism. In 2020, things shifted a bit, and I ended up using the same tools to study SARS-CoV-2 as well. As obligate intracellular parasites, viruses are dependent on the resources of their host to replicate, and one aspect of that relationship which has been difficult to study has been the ways viruses use specific types of lipids during their life cycles. At Bates, I am synthesizing novel lipid probes to investigate how these molecules are used by coronaviruses that cause the common cold. Common cold coronaviruses, while less pathogenic than their flashier family members, are genetically very similar to viruses such as SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2, and are a useful model to study how aspects of the virus life cycle are conserved or distinct among various members of the coronavirus family. My interdisciplinary research program involves virus cell culture, analytical lipid biochemistry, and synthetic organic chemistry.

Selected Publications

Farley, S. E., Kyle, J. E., Jahn, H., Bramer, L. M., Piehowski, P. D., Shepmoes, A. A., Kaiser, B. L., Williams, S. M., Eder, J. G., Schultz, C., Tafesse, F. G. Integrated lipidomic and proteomic profiling reveals metabolic network disruption by SARS-CoV-2 variants. J Lipid Res 2025, 66 (8): 100860. (PMID: 40659247)

Farley, S. E., Hashimoto, R., Evangelista, J., Stein, F., Haberkant, P., Kikuchi, K., Tafesse, F. G., Schultz, C. Trifunctional fatty acid derivatives: the impact of diazirine placement. Chem Commun 2024, 60 (52), 6651-6654. (PMID: 38856656)

Farley, S. E., Stein, F., Haberkant, P., Tafesse, F. G., Schultz, C. Trifunctional sphinganine: a new tool to dissect sphingolipid function. ACS Chem Biol 2024, 19 (2), 336-347 (PMID: 38284972)

Farley, S.E., Thomas, A., Laguerre, A., Schultz, C. Chapter 11: Chemical Biology of Lipids. In textbook: Advanced Chemical Biology. Eds. Hang, H. C., Pratt, M. R., Prescher, J. A. Wiley 2023.

Farley, S. E., Kyle, J. E., Leier, H. C., Bramer, L. M., Weinstein, J., Bates, T. A., Lee, J-Y., Metz, T. O., Schultz, C., Tafesse, F. G. A global lipid map reveals host dependency factors conserved across SARS-CoV-2 variants. Nature Communications 2022, 13 (1): 3487 (PMID: 35715395)