Meet Our First-Year Students

• Kasemsiri Chandarajoti
• Jean-Marc Grandjean
• Nguyen Loung
• Nathan Oien
• Natalie Weir
• Brittany Wright

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Heather N. Bethea hbethea@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2005 Adviser: Jian Liu Heather is interested in understanding the structure and function of key heparan sulfate biosynthetic enzymes.  She wants to research the substrate specificity of these modifying enzymes in hopes of developing a heparan sulfate-based therapeutic agent for the treatment of different cancers or thrombotic diseases.

Laura Bonifacio, PharmD laura_bonifacio@unc.edu Year Admitted: 2006 Adviser: Michael Jarstfer Laura is interested in refining our knowledge of the structure of tTER (the RNA subunit of telomerase) and elucidating new roles for miRNA in physiological processes.

 

Ryan Bullis bullis@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2007 Adviser: Jian Liu Ryan is interested in understanding the structure and function of key heparan sulfate biosynthetic enzymes. He is currently working on expression of these enzymes using the baculovirus expression vector system.

 

Mary Carroll carroll4@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2006 Adviser: Andrew Lee Mary is studying the dynamics of dihydrofolate reductase by NMR spectroscopy

 

Kasemsiri "Joyce" Chandarajoti chandara@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2009 Adviser:

 

Morgan Chapman mchap3@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2008 Adviser:

 

Danielle Cook dr1cook@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2008 Adviser: David Lawrence Danielle is interested in investigating living systems by integrating biology and chemistry.  She is working on developing new biochemical tools that allows one to investigate cell signaling pathways within live cells and more specifically to look at PKA pathways relating to the mitochondria.

 

Steven Cotten swcotten@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2005 Adviser: Rihe Liu Steve is interested in drug-targeting identification using chemical biology as well as developing novel affinity molecules based on toxin peptides.

 

Nicholas Empey empey@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2008 Adviser:

 

Andrew Fant andrew.fant@unc.edu Year Admitted: 2008 Adviser: Alex Tropsha

 

Jean-Marc Grandjean jamgrd@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2009 Adviser:

 

Christopher M. Grulke grulke@unc.edu Year Admitted: 2004 Adviser: Alexander Tropsha Chris is interested in extraction, storage, analysis, and accessibility of chemical and biochemical information.  In particular he is interested in text-mining approaches to annotate and link chemical and biological entities in free-text formats, design of effective methods for storing biochemical data, QSAR-like machine learning techniques for structure-based virtual screening and for HTS data analysis, and web-based tools for sharing of chemical information.

 

Rima Hajjo hajjo@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2005 Adviser: Alexander Tropsha Rima is interested in cheminformatics, chemogenomics, and datamining. Her PhD thesis project is focusing on polypharmacology, network pharmacology and computational screening of the GPCR receptorome.

 

Jui-Hua Hsieh Year Admitted: 2005 Adviser: Alexander Tropsha Jui-Hua's work focuses on ligand-based and structure-based approaches in drug discovery.

 

Chia-Wen Hsu hsuc@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2007 Adviser: Klaus Hahn Chia-Wen is interested in developing novel ratiometric fluorescent dyes and protein caging methods.

 

Hsin-Yi Hung hhung@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2008 Adviser: K. H. Lee Hsin-Yi's research interest lies in designing and synthesizing anti-HIV small molecules.

 

Courtney Jones jonescl@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2005 Adviser: Jian Liu Courtney is interested in identifying biologically active heparins.

 

Wujian Ju wju@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2001 Adviser: Rihe Liu Wujan is working on the identification of biological substrates of using mRNA-protein fusion library

 

Ana Kamilaris alkamila@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2007 Adviser: David Lawrence Ana is interested in developing fluorescent sensors for PKA to study its role in cells.

 

Amber King amberkng@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2006 Adviser: Harold Kohn Amber is interested in organic synthesis and neurobiology, with a focus on voltage-gated sodium channels. Her project involves the synthesis of a novel series of neurological agents and the examination of their activity in epileptic and neuropathic pain models.

 

Tanarat Keitsakorn tanarat@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2004 Adviser: Alexander Tropsha Tanarat's work focuses on computational analysis of protein structures.

 

Renpeng Liu renpengl@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2005 Adviser: Jian Liu Renpeng is interested in the chemoenymatic synthesis of heparin sulfate oligosaccharide.

Man Luo mluo@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2007 Adviser: Alex Tropsha Man is interested in cheminformatics, bioinformatics, data mining and information retrieval. She's currently focusing on computational screening of the GPCR receptorome and ligand-based drug design on developing alternate strategies for targeting drug-resistant pathogenic microorganisms.

 

Pierre Morieux morieux@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2005 Adviser: Harold Kohn Pierre is interested in organic synthesis and chemical biology. His project involves the synthesis and evaluation of small molecule chemical probes to identify potential new biological targets for treating epilepsy.

 

Luong Tien Nguyen ntluong@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2009 Adviser: Luong is interested in organic synthesis and computational chemistry.

 

Nathan Oien oien@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2009 Adviser:

 

Elizabeth Pempe pempe@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2008 Adviser: Jian Liu Liz is studying the effects of 6-O-endosulfatase on heparan sulfate.

 

Sherket Peterson sbp@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2007 Adviser: Jian Liu

 

Justin Roberts justinr1@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2008 Adviser:

 

Maria Florencia Sassano flori@unc.edu Year Admitted: 2004 Adviser: Michael Jarstfer Flori is interested in the discovery of small molecule modulators of social motivation and applications of RNA in drug delivery systems.

 

Vijay Sekaran vsekaran@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2005 Adviser: Michael Jarstfer Vijay studies autosomal dominant (AD) dyskeratosis congenita by focusing on the structural changes in the human telomerase RNA (htR) that lead to the development of this genetic disease

 

Joana Soares jsoares@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2004 Adviser: Michael Jarstfer Joana is studying the chemical and pharmacological modulation of telomerase.

 

Wei Sun sunw@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2007 Adviser: Qisheng Zhang Wei is interested in chemical biology and cancer research. His projects involve small molecule synthesis and assay development.

 

Kun Wang kunwang@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2003 Adviser: Alexander Tropsha Kun is interested in cancer and hERG K+ cahnnel toxicity.

 

Natalie Weir nwrice@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2009 Adviser:

 

Brittany Wright wrightbd@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2009 Adviser:

 

Weichen Xu weichenx@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2007 Adviser: David Lawrence Weichen is interested in developing light-sensitive peptide substrates and inhibitors to study signaling pathways inside the cells.

 

Xiaoming Yang xiaoming@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2006 Adviser: K. H. Lee Xiaoming is researching tylophorine derivatives as anticancer agents

 

Liying Zhang zhangly@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2006 Adviser: Alexander Tropsha Liying is studying the development of ADME QSAR models and predictions of drugs’ ADME properties.

 

Guiyu Zhao yuzh@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2007 Adviser: Alexander Tropsha Guiyu is focusing on establishing effective virtual screening models and computational tools via statistical and chemical approaches. He is also interested in developing 3D QSAR descriptors based on quantum chemical theories.

 

Ting Zhou tingz@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2006 Adviser: K. H. Lee Ting is interested in the design, synthesis, and evaluation of anti-HIV agents.

 

 

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• Graduate Students