Mark Gerstein
Albert L Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, of Computer Science, and of Statistics & Data Science
“AI in Molecular Bioinformatics”
Amir Haji-Akbari
Associate Professor of Chemical & Environmental Engineering
“How to Fold? Using Path Sampling Simulations to Probe Kinetics and Pathways of Protein Folding.”
Sebastian Gonzales La Corte
Postdoctoral Associate (Yan & O’Donnell Lab)
“Morphogenesis of bacterial cables in polymeric environments.”
Sebastian is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University. He earned his B.S. from the University of California, Santa Barbara and his Ph.D. in Quantitative and Computational Biology from Princeton University. For his doctoral research, he investigated bacterial growth in complex fluids. His current research focuses on the spatiotemporal dynamics between biofilms and protozoa, as well as biofilms with worms.
Omar Khalifa
PhD Candidate in Chemical & Environmental Engineering (Haji-Akbari Group)
“Structure-selectivity relationships in ion transport through nanoporores.”
Omar is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Chemical & Environmental Engineering. He earned his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the Petroleum Institute and his M.Sc. in Chemical Engineering from Khalifa University. For his M.Sc. thesis, he designed and built an electro-membrane reactor to treat oily wastewater. His current research focuses on emplying molecular simulations to investigate membrane selectivity, an important aspect of water desalination technology.
Jake Sumner
PhD Candidate in Computational Biology & Bioinformatics (O’Hern Group)
“Modeling proteins as coarse-grained polymers.”
Jake is a 5th Year PhD candidate in the O’Hern group. He went to Duke University for his undergraduate studies, where he earned a B.S. in Biology and minors in Computer Science and German. He currently works on scoring and assessing protein-protein and nanobody-peptide interactions computationally. He has also worked on coarse-grained protein polymer simulations, which is what he is presenting in this CMSE symposium. Jake is married, and his wife and him just had a baby this year in March named Thomas.
Phillip Kang
PhD Student in Computational Biology & Bioinformatics
“Molecular Dynamics Simulations of VMAT2: The Neurotransmitter Packaging System”
Phillip is a first year CBB PhD student, currently rotating with Prof. Carl-Mikael Suomivuori in the Department of Pharmacology. He is from Newton, MA and went to Tufts University studying computer science and cognitive science. Phillip worked as a research assistant at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, conducting research on toxicology testing and trends before graduate school.
Aya Nawano
Computational Research Support Analyst, Yale Center for Research Computing
“Leveraging Yale’s Bouchet HPC Cluster for Molecular Simulations”
Aya is a Computational Research Support Analyst at Yale Center for Research Computing, which supports the advanced computing needs of Yale’s research community. She primarily works with researchers in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences who use the Bouchet, Grace, and Milgram HPC clusters. She earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Enginnering & Materials Science from Yale University. During her Ph.D., she used molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the mechanical properties of amorphous metals.
