My publications in computational biology and computer science are available here.
From 2004 to 2007 I held a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation fellowship entitled Experimental and computational characterization of protein evolutionary landscapes in Dan Hartl's group in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. During the last year of this fellowship I was a visiting scholar in Jim Collin's Biodynamics Lab at Boston University. My postdoctoral research focused on characterizing the selective pressures and constraints on protein evolution due to structure, folding, and interaction with other molecules. The experimental aspect of this project was carried out on the antibiotic-resistant enzyme beta-lactamase in the bacterium Escherichia coli. I also did a bit of research trying to understand the evolution of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum.
I completed my Ph.D. in the Crystallography and Biocomputing Group run by Professor Sir Tom Blundell in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, supported by a U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2002) and a British Marshall Scholarship (2000). My thesis work, entitled ab initio conformational sampling for protein structure determination, analysis, and prediction, was part of the RAPPER project.
As an undergraduate I had the opportunity to do some computer science research on programming language design, autonomous mobile robotics , and artificial intelligence. All of this work was done in the context of the The Autonomous Mobile Robot Group at Northwestern University, which I joined in January 1998. Headed by Computer Science professor Ian Horswill. During this time Pinku Surana and I wrote a compiler for the high-level programming language Scheme, a statically-scoped LISP derivative with first-class functions and continuations called Hotdog using funds from Microsoft Corporation. I also developed a computer vision library called vutils to support my work on an efficient implementation of the adaptive color tracker. Finally, Rob Zubek, who now works for Three Rings on the Puzzle Pirates MMO, and I developed an artificial intelligence inference engine capable of playing a text-based MMO.