(7am) Leveraging Big Data and Engineering Fundamentals Towards Rational Biological Discovery

Teaching Interests:

My academic and research training has spanned many fundamental areas of chemical engineering. As a result, I am very comfortable teaching core subjects such as thermodynamics, transport phenomena, chemical kinetics, and process control and optimization. Additionally, my postdoctoral training allows me to teach many non-traditional electives. I would be interested in teaching the following electives:

Molecular modeling of biomolecules: The junior/senior level course will be divided in three sections and will be heavily based on projects. The initial third of the course will cover operational basics of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, classical mechanics, and quantum chemistry. In the next section, a brief introduction will be given to free energy calculations and to the popular software. In the last section, students will carry out exercises in molecular simulations including simple liquid systems, spin systems, and proteins. These exercises will be designed as small research problems which if successfully completed may result in publications in peer reviewed journals.

Systems biophysics: Complex biological systems are organized in networks of interacting elements; for example, gene regulatory network, protein interaction network, metabolic network, etc. We are continuously updating our understanding of how these networks have evolved and how they operate. It is becoming clear that basic physical can have highly non-trivial effects on the fate of biological networks. Given our progress over the last decade, there have been multiple books explaining the organization of biological networks and the role of physical and physiological constraints in shaping those networks. Drawing examples from my research experience, I would like to teach a seminar course to show students the key experimental and theoretical discoveries in our understanding of dynamics, organization, and evolution of biological networks in recent years. This course will aim to show how biophysics and biochemistry have shaped evolution of networks of proteins, organisms, and ecologies.