Undergraduate Institution: Fort Lewis College (’06)
Research Interest(s):
Project 1: Designed a novel computational method to classify the biochemical functional roles of proteins within a superfamily. This method is used to predict the function of proteins with known structure and unknown function or with an assigned hypothetical function.
Project 2: Screened small molecules in silico to target the human A2A adenosine receptor in order to design the best binders and to conjugate them to imaging agents to identify hypoxic tumors for purposes of detecting early stage cancer.
Personal Interest(s): Running, volunteering, yoga and eating good food.
How did you get interested in science?: By my grandparents who raised animals and harvested crops. Spending time out in nature made me want to understand why things exist. Science answered many of those questions.
What are your future career goals?: Teaching undergraduate courses in chemistry and getting children/people exciting about science!
Conference Presentations:
2013 Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB), Kohala Coast, Hawaii.
2012 4th Annual PhD Symposium – Computational Biology and Innovation, Dublin, IRE
2012 American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) National Meeting, Anchorage, AK - Preparing students for success in graduate school
2012 American Chemical Society (ACS) National Meeting, Philadelphia, PA
2012 Protein Society Conference, San Diego, CA
2012 Trends in Enzymology (TinE, Gottingen, GER
2012 St. Jude National Graduate Student Symposium, Memphis, TN
2011 American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) National Meeting, Minneapolis, MN
2011 Protein Society Conference, Boston, MA
2011 Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology/European Conference on Computational Biology (ISMB/ECCB) Conference, Vienna, AUS
2010 New England Science Symposium, Boston, MA
2010 American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) National Meeting, Albuquerque, NM
2010 American Chemical Society (ACS) National Meeting, Boston, MA
2010 Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) Conference Boston, MA
Publications:
“Electrostatic Properties for Protein Functional Site Prediction,” J.S. Lee and M.J.Ondrechen, in Protein Function Prediction for Omics Era, D. Kihara, Ed., Springer, Dordrecht, pp. 183-196 (2011).
“Functional Classification of Protein 3D Structures from Predicted Local Interaction Sites,” R. Parasuram, J.S. Lee, P. Yin, S. Somarowthu, M.J. Ondrechen, Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, 8, 1-15 (2010).
Awards:
NSF-Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF), Northeastern University, September 2010 – Current (3-year award, competitive)