Current Professional Interests

As of Jan 2007, I do jack-of-all-trades computing support in the Department of Biology at the University of Rochester.

As part of an ongoing effort to use computing to improve the work lives of faculty, staff, and students, and to promote academic computing freedom, I dabbled from time to time in an ongoing project that attempted to use free software to leverage the Iowa State University's extensive and long-standing Kerberos and AFS infrastructure. I also try to keep tabs on what others are doing along those same lines, as well keeping a hand in related extracurricular efforts.

Before that, as of Feb 2000, I did jack-of-all-trades computing support at Iowa State University for the departments of:

• Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Molecular Biology
• Botany
• Zoology & Genetics

Prior to that, I did a short stint as a post-doc with Associate Professor Amy Andreotti of the BBMB department.

A unifying thread in my scientific interests had been the study of structural molecular biology using a combination of magnetic resonance and computational methods.

This gradually morphed into an interest in the implementation of Open Source solutions for investigating bioinformatics questions, specifically but not limited to, structural bioinformatics. In that regard, my involvement with the Ames Free Unix Group had both vocational and avocational components.

Through the summer of 1999, I was a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz, working under the supervision of Professor Glenn Millhauser.

One of the interests I shared with Glenn was the use of spin labels incorporated into model peptides to study the protein folding problem.

With my Ph.D. advisor Richard Eisenberg, I studied the activation of small (but industrially important!) molecules (carbon monoxide, methane, hydrogen) by complexes of rhodium with schiff-bases and schiff-base-derivatives.

Our first publication together, Schiff Base Complexes of Rhodium Containing Alkyl, Hydride and Formyl Ligands used to be available here in encapsulated PostScript format (that was long before most journals started putting stuff online) but the file seems to have gone missing. You could either view it with an external PostScript viewer like GhostView, or you could download it to disk directly and print it out on a PostScript printer. Now, I guess you'll just have to go to the library (sorry). Anyway, the reference is Anderson, D.J. and Eisenberg, R.; Inorg. Chem. 33 (1994) 5378.

I made these, and had fun doing it:

The images of these compounds were generated from the original Postscript ORTEP plots using ortep2html. As for the compounds themselves, see the Inorganic Chemistry reference for the one on the left.

This page was last modified 20090120