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.

 

Miao Chen Year Admitted: 2003 Adviser: Jian Liu Miao is interested in biosynthesis of an AT-binding heptasccharide

 

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

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.

Yizhou Dong yzdong@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2006 Adviser: K. H. Lee Yizhou is interested in anti-breast cancer research.

Keri Ann Flanagan fkeri@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2006 Adviser: Scott F. Singleton Keri is interested in medicinal chemistry and drug discovery. Her research typically involves the utilization of multiple assays to find and validate inhibitors of proteins. She also dabbles in a little organic synthesis of potential inhibitors and molecular modeling to narrow searches of chemical libraries.

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.

 

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

Ana Kamilaris alkamila@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2007 Adviser: David Lawrence

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

 

Amber King amberkng@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2006 Adviser: Harold Kohn Development of a novel series of neurological agents and the examination of their activity.

 

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

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.

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

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.

Tanya Scarlett scarlett@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2002 Adviser: Jian Liu Tanya is workingo n the biochemical characterization of human heparan sulfate 6-O-endosulfatase

 

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

 

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

 

Weichen Xu weichenx@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2007 Adviser: David Lawrence

 

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

 

Chao Zhang chaoz@email.unc.edu Year Admitted: 2007 Adviser: Qisheng Zhang

 

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

 

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.

 

 

• Students and Fellows
• Graduate Students