Lab Alumni

	William Butler Info to follow...
	Ercan Cacan Ercan received his BS degree in Biology from Turkey. After college, he worked on the Taxonomy of Hard Ticks and CCHF Viruses. Currently, he is a PhD student in the Department of Biology at Georgia Tech. Ercan is engineering tRNAs for the efficient incorporation of unnatural amino acids into peptides. He is also engineering members of the Elongation Factor-Tu gene family to experimentally study functional divergence among homologous proteins.
	Megan Cole Megan earned her PhD in biology from MIT in 2008 where she worked in the lab of Rick Young and studied the transcriptional regulatory circuitry of embryonic stem cells. Megan now does evolutionary synthetic biology research studying the cellular translation machinery. Megan is using computational analyses of ancestral sequences to guide the engineering of proteins involved in translation to allow for the efficient incorporation of a wide array of unnatural amino acids into peptides. This work will further our understanding of the process of protein translation and could greatly benefit drug discovery by allowing for an expanded set of amino acids with beneficial properties to be used in therapeutic peptides.
	Kelsey Gratton Info to follow...
	Christina Graves Christina is a senior in the School of Biology at Georgia Tech. She is a member of the Honors Program at Georgia Tech, and has research experience in prebiotic chemistry. She is currently conducting her senior research with Dr. Eric Gaucher, investigating the translational features and limitations human uricase. Her other research interests include the concomitant roles of dietary restriction and viral activity in the etiology of autoimmune disease. In her free time, she plays classical guitar.
	Michael Gromiha PhD Bharathidasan University, 1994, Department of Physics Structural bioinformatics, developing protein thermodynamic prediction tools. Click here for more information.
	Ben Hsieh I am a former electrical engineer that designed circuits for consumer electronics that process audio and video signals. I am also trained as a paramedic and used to volunteer on the side. Now I am back in school to study Bioinformatics to see how living things process information and hope to make something useful with it. My research projects include: 1. Benchmarking existing software that evaluate protein functional divergences based on evolutionary rate change of specific sites of protein sequences. 2. Applying phylogenetic approaches to identify and evaluate known human SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphism) with known clinical association for critical protein sites. 3. Researching the evolutionary history of the protein catenin by a bioinformatic approach.
	Brian Kwan Brian is a 5th year biology undergraduate who is doing research with the guidance of Ryan Randall. In his current project he attempts to recover ancient functional phenotypes from a nonfunctional phenotype using monomeric Red Fluorescent Protein as a model. His future plan is to attend graduate school for a degree in pharmacology.
	Ziming Zhao I am a PhD student in the Bioinformatics program. My research focus is molecular evolution. My main project is reconstructing whole bacterial genomes and studying their evolutions. I am also involved in the following two projects: ancestral sequence reconstruction of thioredoxin, a disulfide bond reduction enzyme; and evolutionary studies of catenins, a protein family involved in cell adhesion and signaling. Click here for more information.
Georgia Tech iGEM Team 2011 As Georgia Tech's very first competing iGEM group, we have embarked on the journey of discovering how we can synthetically engineer heat producing bacteria. After extensively investing various organism's methods of heat production, we have found great promise in the AOX gene used for themogenesis in many plant species. Please visit our site to learn more!
	Kayla Arroyo and Penny Kahn Penny and Kayla are two ambitious seniors at Dunwoody High School who wish to excel in academics and laboratory research.This duo competed in a national science competition, the Siemens Competition, where they performed research in our lab to uncover the biological role of fluorescent proteins within their coral hosts. Kayla and Penny continue to commute to GT during the school year to perform their exciting research with fluorescent proteins.