Associate Director of the Rice Alliance Clean Energy Accelerator

NoviRad, Inc. is a seed-stage startup with a patent-pending percutaneous catheter system for use in interventional radiology.

We are developing a point-of-care medical device to diagnose oral dysfunctions in newborns.

The projects that I have developed focus on improving capabilities and usability of pathfinding software designed to identify novel biosynthetic pathways. Duties:- Managed laboratory with duties including purchasing equipment and consumables as well as routine maintenance of equipment.- Trained, advised, and mentored undergraduates through various independent projects.- Trained researchers outside of our laboratory on proper use of equipment under Rice University's Shared Equipment Authority.- Educated new laboratory members about general laboratory safety including the use of personal protective equipment, the proper use of chemical fume hoods and biosafety cabinets, hazardous chemical usage and segregation, hazard communication, proper waste segregation and disposal, proper gas cylinder use, spill response, and emergency response. - Preserved laboratory strains.- Presented weekly in laboratory meetings to describe progress and challenges of ongoing projects and research topics.Accomplishments:- Constructed expression vectors required for genetically engineering E. coli to generate useful precursor compounds (malonic acid and myo-inositol) as well as therapeutic agents (5-aminosalicylic acid, which is used in the management of chronic gastrointestinal diseases). - Facilitated interpretation of complex data by improving the ranking of solutions produced by a pathfinding algorithm by incorporating estimates of thermodynamics parameters to highlight biologically feasible and novel synthetic pathways.- Identified a clustering method and distance measure that best grouped computationally generated pathways against known groupings identified in the literature (Kim et al., 2016).- Evaluated various pathfinding applications (LPAT, FMM, DESHARKY, Metabolic Tinker, XTMS, enviPath, and BioSynther) by comparing the number and diversity of elucidated pathways to value-added xenobiotic compounds.

I have taught and developed content for introductory biology courses and labs (BIOL 1351 - Introduction to Population Biology and Evolution, BIOL 1151, and BIOL 1152) and upper division courses and labs (BIOL 2333 - Microbiology for Nursing and BIOL 3133 - Microbiology Lab).

Principal Investigators: Tim Elston, Ph.D. and Beverly Errede, Ph.D.- Designed microfluidic experiments to interrogate the pheromone signaling pathway in budding yeast, a paradigm for mitogen activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling cascades in all eukaryotes.- Developed computational models for gene expression and experimentally tested model predictions through genetic manipulation of putative regulatory motifs.- Quantified microscopy data to track single-cell behavior over time and study transcriptional variation within a population of cells.

Principal Investigator: Yousif Shamoo, Ph.D.- Demonstrated that microbial adaptation to stresses such as temperature or antibiotics could be predicted using enzyme kinetic and protein-folding models. This information, used in conjunction with microbial population simulations, addressed the Genotype-Phenotype problem of biology (Peña et al., 2010).