Postdoc Scholars Program
Mentor: Russ B. Altman
Department: Genetics
Dr. Assaf Gottlieb's research is focused on two complementary challenges: (1) the molecular-level understanding of drug response and its application to drug repurposing and pharmacovigilance; and (2) the personalization of treatment based on population subtyping using phenotypic information extracted from electronic health records.
Assaf's previous postdoctoral appointment was in the Balvatnik School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, where his research focused on integrating multiple genomic data types for inference of novel drug targets, indications and drug interactions. Former research topics (MS and PhD) include: (1) development of data analysis algorithms, including quantum clustering and the unsupervised feature filtering algorithm; and (2) motif analysis of protein families.
Mentor: Vijay Pande
Department: Chemistry
Dr. Diwakar Shukla's research is focused on understanding the complex biological processes involving key cellular signaling proteins such as GPCRs and kinases using distributed computing approaches and platforms such as Google Exacycle, Folding@home etc.
Diwakar started his research career at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, India, where he received BTech and MTech degrees in chemical engineering. He then went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received an MS and PhD in chemical engineering for his work on solution biochemistry.
Mentor: Markus Covert
Department: Bioengineering
Dr. David Van Valen employs single-molecule, single-cell, and systems level techniques to better understand the interactions between viruses and their hosts.
David studied mathematics (BS 2003) and physics (BS 2003) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, applied physics (PhD 2011) at the California Institute of Technology, and medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA (MD 2011). David's past research projects have explored how organisms process and transfer information. His work has demonstrated how signaling proteins can use flexible chains of amino acids to modulate how they respond to chemical stimuli. He has also applied single-molecule techniques to the study of bacterial viruses. In particular, he developed a single-molecule Hershey-Chase experiment, enabling the first visualization of single viruses infecting single bacterial cells in real time (featured in Science magazine's editor's choice section).