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Welcome to my site. I am an Assistant professor in Computer Science at Allegheny College and I look forward to getting to know you in class.
Who I am?
Please share your academic/teaching background. I earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Creighton University, a master’s degree in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in information science and technology from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. My dissertation concerned the investigation of biological signals in genetic information using computational methods and analysis. Specifically, my research work served to determine some of the reasons for the muscular tissue breakdowns after an exposure to zero-gravity during space flight.
What are your academic/research interests? Much of my graduate work as well as the publication of several journal and conference articles was sponsored by multiple NASA grants. My general research experiences and interests include the prediction of the terrestrial protein disorders found in many diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and Parkinson’s, text mining of large biological and medical data, creating music from genetic information, and designing novel methods for encryption using methods from bioinformatics.
What are your Unusual Combinations? While born in America, I was raised in a traditional English family from London, and have an extensive family in France. Because of my international family, I spent much of my childhood and early adulthood summers in England and in France while visiting family and studying languages and arts. After obtaining my bachelor’s degree, I spent seven years living, studying and working in France. I studied French languages, poetry and art at the Sorbonne. I am an enthusiastic poet and have won several poetry awards. I joined a French bio-tech company in Paris, where I applied my biological expertise to mathematically and computationally analyze their data. I also continued to apply my poetry skills to describe the outcomes of my data-analysis. While my boss sometimes disagreed with the style and the mood of these reports, the clients of the company were always enthusiastic to receive them. During this work experience, I developed a strong desire to be able to design my own computational analytical tools, a desire which led me into graduate school at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and a career in academia.
Please share one fun fact/interest about yourself. My favorite activities include exploring new hiking spots; solving Rubik’s cubes; writing small poetry pieces; and trying to decide between a marmite or a cucumber sandwich, or a wedge of Camembert on a slice of baguette.
Where and How could I find out more about you? Make an appointment during my office-hours and I would be happy to help you with any questions that you may have. I will give priority to those questions which concern, either, the classes that I teach, or my research, its community and their current opinions. See you soon. :-)
