My interests are in bioinformatics and computational biology. At Loma Linda University, I teach and coordinate an introductory class to bioinformatics, covering pairwise sequence alignments to molecular phylogeny. The objectives of the course are to provide survey knowledge of bioinformatics methods and applications and the ability to perform genes and protein analysis with bioinformatics tools. In addition to teaching, I act as a resource person in the Computational Biology Laboratory. Previously, I worked on molecular phylogentic analysis of Hepatitis C virus (HCV), determining if subsequences of HCV behaved similarly as the whole genome. The importance of the study is to find out if regions of HCV can be better used in diagnostic testing.

Purdy M. A., Gonzales A., Dimitrova Z., and Khudyakov Y., Phylogenetic Relationship between Different Regions of the Hepatitis B Virus Genome. Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics Approaches to Infectious Disease Research. Portland, OR, Oct 6-9, 2004, #78