Our People
Although we have advanced equipment at our disposal, the lab's most valuable resources are its people.
Steven T. Whitten, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Steve is
a research scientist in the Hilser lab at UTMB. Currently, through computational
modeling, he studies the
structural-thermodynamic determinants
of protein stability and function.
Steve received his Ph. D. in 1999 from the Biophysics Department at the
Johns Hopkins University. There, his thesis centered on the contributions
of electrostatic interactions to protein energetics. Prior, he received
a B.S. in Physics from the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Suwei Wang Graduate Student
Suwei is a graduate student in the BSCB program at UTMB in Galveston. He joined Dr. Hilser's lab in February, 2004.
Suwei received his masters degree in computer science from UT Dallas. Currently, his research is focused on analysis of the statistical thermodynamic determinants of protein folding.
Jason Vertrees Graduate Student
Jason
is currently a second year graduate student in the Biophysical, Computational
and Structural Biology (BSCB) program at UTMB. He received his undergraduate
degrees in Computer Science and Japanese from the University of Texas at Austin
in Dec. 2001.
Protein sequences derived from individual amino acid components have been shown
to contain distinctive thermodynamic signatures. Furthermore, using powerful
data clustering techniques, these signatures may be statistically classified
into thermodynamic equivalency classes. The goal of my project is to create
a mapping from these linear sequences to an interpretable form, and to experimentally
verify this scheme. The thrust of this project lies in the direct application
once solved: the interpretable data may be used for such protein studies as:
possibly locating proteins with very low sequence identity having nearly identical
function; quickly identifying ligand binding sites; and, opening up a whole
new field of protein classification based on thermodynamic signatures.
Anthony Manson Graduate Student
Coming Soon
Jeff Chen Graduate Student
Coming Soon
Rodrigo Diaz Espinosa Graduate Student
Coming Soon
Previous Students
Josephine Ferreon - Post-doc; Scripps Research Institute
James B. Hamburger - Post-doc; University of Pennsylvania
Scott A. Larson - Medical Student; University of Texas San Antonio
Previous Post-docs
Tong Liu, Ph.D. - University of California, San Diego
Andrew J. Kurtz- NIH Fellowship, Bethesda, MD.
James Wrabl - Research Scientist; University of Texas Southwest Medical Center
Reza Razeghifard - Research Fellow; Australian National University
John Wooll - Teaching Faculty; Aurora Community College,
CO.