Education & Outreach - [ 2008 Bioinformatics Resources ]

Dr. Susan Bridges is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and co-director of the Institute for Digital Biology. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Bridges' research areas include Bioinformatics, Machine Learning, Knowledge Discovery, and Data Mining. Her current research interests are in the area of computational biology where the goal is to develop methods and techniques for automatically acquiring new and useful knowledge from large high throughput molecular biology databases. She collaborates with biologists in many departments at MSU and at several other universities. Her research is funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Homeland Security. For more information about Dr. Susan Bridges, visit http://www.cse.msstate.edu/~bridges/.

Dr. Sherry Herron is an Assistant Professor and Director of The Center for Science and Mathematics Education at the University of Southern Mississippi. At USM, where she earned her Ph.D, she teaches and conducts research in the field of science education. Herron has taught undergraduate courses for biology majors and courses for non-science majors. These include all of the freshman biology courses at USM; "The Basis of Evolution", and an upper-level molecular and cell biology laboratory course at UT-Dallas. Her science education graduate courses include Biotechnology, Bioethics, and Issues in Human Biology. Herron has authored various forms of curricula including: laboratory manuals for university courses, high school biology textbooks, supplemental units, informal science education units, and professional development programs. She currently serves as the Vice President for the Mississippi Science and Engineering Fair and a co-director for Region I. For more information about Dr. Sherry Herron visit http://www.usm.edu/biology/faculty/Faculty_Profile_Sherry_Herron.htm.

Robert L. Hester, Ph.D. received his doctorate in Biomedical Engineering from Mississippi State University and The University of Mississippi Medical Center in 1982. He completed postdoctoral training at The University of Virginia. He joined The University of Mississippi Medical Center in 1985 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology. He was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 1993 and his current rank of Professor in 2000. Dr. Hester's research interests include the control of blood flow to tissue, particularly the mechanisms by which increases in metabolic rate increase muscle blood flow. Dr. Hester has published 54 peer reviewed manuscripts. He has had two national AHA grants, two NIH grants and is currently funded by the NSF EPSCoR. He is on the editorial board for American Journal of Physiology and Microcirculation. He served as President of the Microcirculatory Society. He has served on numerous committees for NIH, American Physiological Society and the American Heart Association. Dr. Hester currently serves as Chairman of American Heart Association Study Section. For more information about Dr. Robert Hester visit http://physiology.umc.edu/faculty/hester.htm.

Dr. Raphael Isokpehi is an Assistant Professor at Jackson State University. In 2000, he completed his PhD in Medical Microbiology at the University of Lagos in Nigeria. Isokpehi then carried out his Post-Doc in Bioinformatics at the South African National Bioinformatics Institute at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa (2004). He received research training at the Institute of Environmental Health and Animal Hygiene, University of Hohenheim, Germany as well as the Division of Infectious Diseases, Vanderbilt University, TN, USA. Among his research interests are biological data mining and integration; gene expression data analysis, text mining and pathogen bioinformatics. He is the Director of the Center for Bioinformatics, College of Science, Engineering & Technology, Jackson State University and Principal Investigator of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)-funded Bioinformatics in Biodefense Career Development Program. In addition, Isokpehi has coordinated the training workshops at JSU including A Field Guide to GenBank & NCBI Molecular Biology Resources (November 2005), Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Bioinformatics Workshop (April 2006) and Avian Flu School Workshop (September 2007). He has served on international committees for selecting students for bioinformatics training workshops and travel awards. For more information about Dr. Raphael Isokpehi visit http://compbio.jsums.edu/textpresso and http://www.jsums.edu/cset/biofaculty/isokpehi.htm.

Dr. Fiona McCarthy received her Ph.D from the Institute for Molecular Biology at the University of Queensland, Australia in 2003. McCarthy is one of the newer members of faculty in the Department of Basic Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine at Mississippi State University. She was appointed as Assistant Professor in December 2007 because of her work developing and founding the AgBase database. She is a member of the MSU Institute of Digital Biology. McCarthy's research interests include Molecular Virology, Functional Genomics, Structural and Functional Annotation, Genomics, and Bioinformatics and Biological Databases. Her current project is to co-ordinate the maintenance and development of the AgBase database (http://www.agbase.msstate.edu/). For more information about Dr. Fiona McCarthy visit http://www.cvm.msstate.edu/basic_sciences/faculty/mccarthy_fiona.html.

Dr. Bindu Nanduri is an EPSCoR faculty in the area of Computational Systems Biology at Mississippi State University. Dr. Nanduri received her Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in 1998 in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Dr. Nanduri's research areas include Systems Biology, Microbial Genomics & Proteomics. Dr. Nanduri's current research projects involve structural annotation of genomes by proteogenomic mapping and genomic tiling arrays, network modeling of bovine respiratory pathogen response to antibiotics and systems analysis of human respiratory pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae TIGR4 pathogenesis in animal models. She has developed novel methods as well as software for quantitative proteomics and is currently working on identifying protein-protein interactions from gene expression data.

Ken Pendarvis is a Mississippi native who graduated from the MSU College of Engineering in 2005 with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering. Ken was employed by the Life Sciences and Biotechnology Institute as a research associate in May of 2007. He works mainly in the field of proteomics and specializes in protein identification using mass spectrometry.

Ms. Juliet Tang graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1986 with a M.S. in Entomology. Since then, Tang became interested in molecular techniques and has been actively involved in the field of agricultural biotechnology. Tang joined the staff of MSU's Life Science and Biotechnology Institute as Facilities Manager in 2003. Tang supports the research efforts of a number of faculty/staff/students from diverse disciplines. Examples of her research projects include evolution of insect resistance to plants carrying Bt toxin genes, DNA fingerprinting of fire ants to study gene flow among populations and insecticide efficacy, and DNA fingerprinting as a means of plant variety identification in patent applications. In her personal life, Tang enjoys the outdoors and is a strong proponent for environmental protection.