My research interests include understanding the relation between human variation in protein coding regions and the function of these proteins, specifically in how these functions affect disease. I am currently working on a project building bioinformatics tools that try to understand how SNPs, in genes associated with hypertension, affect protein function. Our tool leverages protein homologues and phylogeny methods for predicting which SNPs are functional. We have a paper that is currently under review on this research project. My thesis research will focus on extending this method to combine information from both sequences and structures in order to make more accurate predictions, and the more challenging problem of predicting the function of the SNP on a protein. In cooperation with researchers from the Medical School at UCSD, I will apply these tools to understand hypertension genes.
