Curriculum Vitae

My research is primarily directed at understanding molecular function regulation by exploring the mechanistic atomic level interactions that affect function and/or effect molecular level switching as well as the associated regulatory pathways. To accomplish this, my research group studies the structure, function and evolution of biological macromolecules to compare how the atomic level differences can result in different functions by effecting regulatory or mechanistic changes. We source our data from public repositories such as GenBank and the Protein Data Bank as well as by generating internal data such as genome sequences, transcriptome sequences and methylome sequences from specific experiments. The approaches employed in exploring and investigating these datasets primarily involve bioinformatics, computational biology and genomics but also extend to structural biology (mainly X-ray crystallography), synthetic biology and systems biology. The insights revealed from these investigations can provide clues as to how molecular level regulation and responses in living systems are carried out that eventually lead to an organism’s capacity to adapt to extreme (ie. extremophiles) or diverse environments (ie. such as a bacterial pathogen or parasite adapting to a host) as well as the discovery of novel factors associated with pathogenesis (toxins and pathogenesis/virulence regulation systems). Our understanding of the atomic level interactions that define specific biological mechanisms have led to the development of applications for drug repositioning and tools for the synthetic design of nucleic acid self-assembling structures.