Current research Graduate Student, UC Berkeley
I am a grad student in the labs of Susan Marqusee and Carlos Bustamante, studying the behavior of protein molecules when they are placed under mechanical strain. This allows us to ask questions about how proteins evolve to develop robust structures that can withstand and exert high forces within the cell.
The experimental tool I use is called the optical tweezers: a set of focused lasers that allows for the direct manipulation of single molecules. By applying forces to isolated protein molecules at specific points, and observing their response to these forces, we can determine which structural motifs lead to high or low durability.
Proteins exert and resist force in a huge variety of processes—from blood clotting to muscle contraction—so this understanding will be critical in learning how to correct these interactions when they go awry and lead to diseases (paper link).
Previous work Williams College and UC Berkeley
For my undergrad thesis, I studied ultrafast semiconductor physics with Sarah Bolton. As my first stint in biological research, I then did post-baccalaureate research with Daniel Aalberts on the statistics of RNA splicing sites (paper link).
In my first year at Berkeley, I did epidemiology research with Wayne Getz, simulating the potential impact of a vaccine for Hepatitis C—several of which are currently in development—on reducing the disease's prevalence in injecting drug users in San Francisco (paper link).
Software tools Helpful code for Matlab users
In scientific presentations, the most important parts of a story are told in graphs. Unfortunately, there are often occasions where the content of an otherwise informative plot is obscured by illegible axis labels or single-pixel-wide lines.
To combat this problem I have written the following program: Pimp My Slide. Run it immediately after creating a graph in Matlab, and it takes care of everything.
(More useful code to follow...)
