Biomolecular Engineering
Baskin School of Engineering
335 Baskin Engineering Building
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu
Program Statement | Course Descriptions
Faculty and Professional Interests
Professor
Mark Akeson
Development of nanopore sensors for single molecule identification, epigenetics, bioethics
Phillip Berman
Distinguished Professor
Drug development, vaccines, AIDS, monoclonal antibody therapeutics, immunology, molecular cell/biology, recombinant protein production (commercial scale)
Camilla Forsberg
Hematopoietic stem cells, stem cell fate decisions, transcriptional regulation, chromatin, epigenetics, blood and immune cell development, hematopoietic cell transplantation and trafficking, genetic engineering, bioengineering
David Haussler
Bioinformatics, genomics, computational genomic data analysis, molecular evolution and comparative genomics, genomic and clinical data sharing and standards, cancer genomics, neurodevelopment, stem cell research, immunogenomics, information theory, pattern recognition, machine learning, artificial intelligence, information theory, theoretical computer science
Richard Hughey (joint with Computer Engineering)
Bioinformatics, hidden Markov models, computer architecture, parallel computation
Kevin Karplus
Genome assembly from next-generation sequence data (Formerly protein structure prediction), signal processing and statistics for nanopore signals
Todd Lowe
Experimental and computational genomics, non-coding RNA gene finders, and high-throughput small RNA sequencing small RNA roles in cancer, evolution of RNA-based gene regulation
Nader Pourmand
Bioelectronics, biosensors, chemosensors, nanotechnology, single-cell characterization, sequencing, genotyping, pathogen detection, DNA fingerprinting
Joshua Stuart
Jack Baskin Endowed Chair of Biomolecular Engineering
Computational functional genomics, comparative analysis of gene regulation, cross-species inference of gene networks, probabilistic graphical models
Associate Professor
Richard “Ed” Green
Genomics, computational molecular biology, genome assembly, human evolutionary genetics, ancient DNA, high-throughput sequencing, mRNA-processing and alternative splicing
Assistant Professor
Angela Brooks
Genomics, functional genomics, cancer genomics, RNA processing, gene regulation, gene variant function
Russell Corbett-Detig
Population genomics and functional consequences of natural selection; the evolution of chromosomal inversion polymorphism, intra-specific epistasis, and genome-wide patterns of natural selection
Rebecca M. Dubois
Protein engineering, structural biology, X-ray crystallography, virology, vaccines, antibody therapeutics, antiviral drugs
Daniel H. Kim
Stem cell genomics, long noncoding RNAs, single cell analysis, epigenetic reprogramming, cancer
Christopher Vollmers
Developing DNA sequencing tools to analyze B cells on a population and single cell level
Research Professor
David W. Deamer (UC Davis Emeritus)
Membrane biophysics, nanopore analysis, DNA sequencing, biomolecular self-assembly
Adjunct Professor
Robert Coffman
Regulation of innate and adaptive immunity, systems biology of human immune responses, development of novel vaccines and oligonucleotide-based drugs
Jonathan Trent
Organic aggregates, marine snow, microbial physiology, microenvironments, robust proteins, genetic engineering for nanotechnology
Zemin Zhang
Cancer genomics, bioinformatics, anti-cancer target and biomarker discovery, tumor immunology, drug-genome interaction
Assistant Adjunct Professor
David Bernick
Biofuel production using reengineered extremophiles, especially halophiles; next-generation sequencing applications including genome assembly, metagenome assembly and RNA transcriptomics; extremozymes - viral/microbial gene discovery - RNA/RNA packing motors and porins; single-molecule sequencing of highly structured/modified tRNA; novel halo virus discovery
Continuing Lecturer
Wendy Rothwell
Biotechnology, molecular genetics
♦ ♦ ♦
Manuel Ares, Jr. (Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology)
RNA processing, structure and function of RNA
Hinrich Boeger (Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology)
Chromatin structure and gene regulation
Manel Camps (Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology)
Molecular mechanisms of reactive DNA methylation toxicity
William Dunbar (Computer Engineering)
Theory and application of feedback control, single-molecule biophysics, nanopore sensors, dynamics and control of biomolecules
Lars Fehren-Schmitz (Anthropology)
Palaeogenetics/anthropological genetics, human evolutionary ecology, evolutionary demography, gene-culture coevolution, migration theories, population history of the Americas, archaeology of South America
A. Russell Flegal, Emeritus (Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology)
Robert S. Lokey (Chemistry and Biochemistry)
Organic chemistry, combinatorial synthesis, biotechnology, molecular cell biology
Glenn L. Millhauser (Chemistry and Biochemistry)
Electron spin resonance; nuclear magnetic resonance, melanocortin receptor signaling, agouti proteins, prions, peptide synthesis
Karen Ottemann (Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology)
How bacterial pathogens are able to chronically colonize mammalian hosts and cause disease outcomes such as inflammation and cancer
Beth Shapiro (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology)
Evolutionary and molecular ecology, ancient DNA, genomics, pathogen evolution
John W. Tamkun (Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology)
Transcriptional regulation, molecular genetics of Drosophila development, regulation of gene expression
Hongyun Wang (Applied Mathematics and Statistics)
Single molecule studies and biophysics, statistical physics, stochastic processes and stochastic differential equations, classical analysis, numerical analysis
Manfred K. Warmuth (Computer Science)
Online learning, machine learning, statistical decision theory, game theory, analysis of algorithms
W. Todd Wipke, Emeritus (Chemistry and Biochemistry)
Fitnat H. Yildiz (Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology)
Understanding processes controlling transmission of bacterial pathogens
Alan M. Zahler (Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology)
Alternative pre-mRNA splicing and small RNA function
Revised: 09/01/16
