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As a member of the Newman and Wold labs at Caltech, I
studied the metabolic organization of bacterial biofilms and work with
Shewanella oneidensis strain MR-1. I wrote a program in Python
to design oligos for microarrays.
I recently attended the 11th International Symposium on Microbial Ecology and presented a poster on "Spatial variability in developing Shewanella oneidensis biofilms"
I did a project at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the Center for Life Detection with Dr. Ken Nealson characterizing Anaerabranca californiensis with Dr. Alexandre Tsapin and Dr. Vladimir Gorlenko. I also did a project in collective robotics on The phenotypic diversity of patrolling agents with Dr. Alcherio Martinoli. The CORO group works with Khepera robots which are really cool! Before venturing into work with real bacteria, I worked with Dr. Chris Adami in theDigital Life Laboratory using the program Avida. This program is a digital simulation of bacterial evolution, and I was trying to determine the error threshold for different populations. Nothing really came of my work, except that I got better at programming in C++, but the group had an unrelated Nature paper while I was there. This is really interesting work, especially if you're interested in evolutionary dynamics. Across town at UCLA I got an MS in biology working with Dr. Charles Taylor in the Organismic Biology, Ecology and Evolution department. My thesis was on the effects of compression on the evolution of language. I admit this was more of a computational linguistics project than a biology project, but it did deal with evolution a bit. We have a couple of publications on the topic. While a grad student at UCLA I attended the Santa Fe Institute Complex Systems Summer School and was involved in Artificial Life, particularly the conferences Alife VI and Alife VII. And before all this I got my BS in Cybernetics at UCLA. I did no research while an undergraduate, but I did work in computer support for Research and Instructional Biocomputing Services and as a camp counselor and lifeguard at the UCLA Alumni family camp Bruin Woods.
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