Me

I’m a computational chemist in the Mobley Lab at the University of California, Irvine, working toward a PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences. I got a B.A. in Physics from Claremont McKenna College, tutored for a while, and I now perform Molecular Dynamics simulations of proteins, with a focus on modeling of diffuse scattering in X-ray Protein Crystallography.

I was born in Phoenix, grew up in New Jersey, and live in California.

I’m a part-time farmer, musician, and wanna-be chef.

I love music, cooking, maths, historical oddities, mythology, traveling and, most of all, my dog, Évariste.

 

My Research

Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations are fancy, physics-based, all-atom stop-motion animation.

You load in a file that tells the computer where all of the atoms in the system are supposed to be, how they are connected to each other, and their properties (charge, mass, etc.)*. You then “teach” the computer Newton’s laws of motion, throw in simulated waters and other small molecules to make the environment match the biological environment as closely as possible, and set the thing in motion: let the system evolve according to Newton’s Laws for a moment, stop, see where Newtons laws tell us they should go next, move them there, repeat.

At the Mobley Lab, we work with, and improve, these computational methods to gather pharmaceutically relevant information about systems in atomic-level detail, and on a time scale normally inaccessible to physical methods (time-steps in a MD simulation are usually on the order of a femtosecond , or 10^-15 seconds).

*Aside: we figure out where all the atoms in a protein are to begin with by blasting crystallized chunks of the pure protein with X-rays. My current research involves modeling those crystals and the scattering of X-rays through them.

This Website

Ideally, I see this website functioning as hub for all things about me worth sharing with everybody: my research, my interests, my thoughts, etc.

Hope you’re doing well.