Education

• Graduate student in the Ph.D program for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, ISU. 08/2007 ~ present
• B.A. Biology, Concordia University St. Paul. 08/2003 ~ 05/2007
• B.A. Mathematics, Concordia University St. Paul. 08/2003 ~ 05/2007

Working Experience

• 02/2008 ~ present: L.H. Baker Center for Bioinformatics and Biological Statistics, Iowa State University, Research assistant
• 08/2005 ~ 05/2007: Group and Individual Mathematics Tutor, Concordia University St. Paul
• 08/2003 ~ 06/2006: Group and Individual Biology Tutor at Concordia University St. Paul
• 06/2006 ~ 08/2006: NSF REU at Northern Arizona University
• 06/2005 ~ 08/2005: NSF REU at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College

Skills

1. Experienced in programming using Matlab and Perl.

2. Familiarity with PHP, HTML, MySQL, Java, C++, SAS, LaTeX, and Python programming.

3. Understanding of broad biological areas, including Biochemistry, Pathology, Physiology, Microbiology, systems biology, etc.

4. Versed in the common experimental methods of EMSA, DNA purification, cell transformation, culture preparation, etc.

5. Acquainted with the theory behind many biochemical and biophysical techniques including EPR, FRET, NMR, x-ray crystallography, molecular tethering, SNP analysis, and recombinant genetics.

Research Interests

     Improving Elastic Network Models for protein mechanics and dynamics and their refinement with respect to multiple data types.

Current interests

1. Presently I am investigating the energy landscape of conformational transitions by monitoring the energetics of a decoy set as each folds by nonlinear normal mode interpolation towards a target conformation. Presently, the interpolation modes are chosen based on a linear shortest path, but we seek a new definition of shortest path that will allow for physically meaningful interpolations.

2. Elastic Network Models and Molecular Dynamics for elucidating the global motions of sub-cellular machinery. Specifically, I will look at electron microscopy tomographic images of the ribosome and analyze the effect of accessory protein binding on its intrinsic motions through normal mode analysis.

3. Investigating crystallographic Debye-Waller (B) factors for the relative contribution of internal (flexible) and external (rigid) protein motions. I have developed a model that has the same form as one of the common models of internal motion that treats the protein of interest as a nearly rigid body. I hope to find a proper way to combine this model or a similar one with the more common models of internal motion to help explain the crystallographic B factors.

4. One additional study is a further investigation of the atomic motion anisotropy in protein structures and how different parameterizations of elastic network models perform in their ability to capture this property.

Presentations

• Guest lecturer at New Mexico State University for a short course in Scientific Web Programming. August 2008.

Poster Presentations

1.“A Three-Step Approach For Multi-class Cancer Classification Using Genetic Algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization and Extreme Learning Machine.” Extracellular and Membrane Proteases in Cell Signalling , 2008.

2."Identifying Redundant Linear Constraints in Semi-Definite Programming"
Presented at: The National AMS/MAA meeting in New Orleans , 2007. Presented at: SigmaPi lecture at Concordia University St. Paul, Fall 2006.

3."Lotka-Voltera Four Species Food Chain Dynamics"
Presented at: PiMuEpsilon conference at St. Johns University , Spring 2006.
Presented at: SigmaPi lecture at Concordia University St. Paul, Fall 2005.