Friday, May 25, 2007

Answering Mea

Mea asked (ever so nicely) what my dissertation is on, and how Toronto is as a city. Frankly, I haven't seen much of Toronto... it's a big place, and I'm mostly meeting with professors. Lettuce Knit, however, is *awesome*! I highly recommend hanging out there on a Wednesday night for their SNB.

My dissertation... um, well, if I use the big words, I'm looking to see if protein allostery can possibly be explained by changes in rigidity using combinatorial methods. Using less scary words, I'm applying a mathematical idea to biology using computer science. Explanations are pretty long... how badly do you want one? ;)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

*eyes glaze over* I didn't even understand the SIMPLE explaination of that... but all I can say is thank goodness there are smart folks like you out there doing the stuff us mere mortals don't even understand! Math, biology, computer science... akkk! I'm doing good to balance the bank statement, and post to blogs, and as to biology... nada clue lol. And recently you said something about math and fun in the same breath.... way beyond my understanding lol.

noricum said...

Well, the simple explanation doesn't attempt to explain anything, just give a general *idea* of what it is I'm doing... and that it's best to have a decent understanding of one or more of those topics before you ask me to go into a detailed explanation. ;)

omly said...

That is actually a really interesting field, and I would be interested in hearing more even if it was taken off the blog.

Most of my exposure to proteins and what not was the small bits of biochemistry that snuck into my upper level chemistry courses. There was even a smidgen of it in my computational chemistry courses though we focused on the concept and confirmed 3D structures since our software didn't do well with things that big.

These days in chemical engineering I do see a lot of biological engineers and bimedical engineers, but none of them at Tufts University are doing computational modeling. In fact I think I am the only graduate student doing any of any kind (DFT of catalyst surfaces).