Biomolecular Engineering

2018-19 General Catalog

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
Distinguished Professor

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
Teaching analog electronics (formerly protein-structure prediction, genome assembly, and signal processing 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

Benedict Paten
Computational genomics, biological sequence analysis, human variation, genome evolution, precision medicine

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

Associate Adjunct Professor

Nathalie Scholler
Recombinant antibody engineering, yeast-display library screening, cancer biomarkers, cancer immunology, ovarian cancer, tumor microenvironment, cancer vaccines, innate immunity

Assistant Adjunct Professor

David Bernick
Synthetic biology as a means to produce energy, medicines, food and for waste conversion, single molecule sequencing of tRNA as a means to understand mitochondrial disease, gene discovery of extremozymes and their applications, high throughput sequencing of novel genomes, RNA abundance, microbial communities and viruses at the extremes

Theodore Goldstein
Cancer bioinformatics research including prostate cancer, pediatric cancer and immunotherapy; gene expression as a clinical tool, pathway analysis, machine learning, collaborative social networking, scoring systems

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

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: 07/15/18