About

I'm a PhD candidate in the joint University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University biophysics program with Prof. Lillian Chong and Prof. Angela Gronenborn. My research is focused on studying protein dynamics under the lens of computational biophysics, but you can occasionally find me in the wet lab.

My thesis project began with a focus on the integration of biophysical experiments such as NMR spectroscopy with molecular dynamics simulations. Specifically, I'm intergrating ¹⁹F NMR with weighted ensemble simulations for rare events sampling. To do this, I first derived a set of force field parameters for fluorinated amino acids, enabling me to directly compare ¹⁹F NMR experiments and my simulation environments. After much effort, I was able to directly observe an experimentally validated conformational transition of the dimeric HIV-1 capsid protein. While I got the result I wanted, it took way more resources (both personally and computationally) than I expected. This directly inspired (and provided some training data for) the current phase of my thesis, which is focused on developing new methods that combine machine learning with weighted ensemble. My ultimate goal is to enable more efficient and automated path sampling simulations by learning which metrics to use and which trajectories to focus simulation time on.

Education

2019-present  PhD Candidate, Biophysics, University of Pittsburgh & Carnegie Mellon University
2014-2018   B.Sc. Biochemistry, University of Delaware

• Research
• Publications