L. Chitayat| Photo: Zeno Fox
Age: 20 >> PhD student at MIT
Even before she turned 20, Liyam Chitayat began her doctorate at MIT, one of the leading academic research institutions in the US and the world, and won the Hertz Award for Research Excellence - the most...
Professor Ernest Fraenkel has decoded fundamental aspects of Huntington’s disease and glioblastoma, and is now using computation to better understand amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
At a time in which scientific research is increasingly cross-disciplinary, Ernest Fraenkel, the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology in MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering, stands out as both a very early adopter of drawing from different scientific fields and a great advocate of the practice today.
When Fraenkel’s students find themselves at an impasse in their work, he suggests they approach their problem from a different angle or look for inspiration in a completely unrelated field.
“I think the thing that I always come...
Tamara Broderick uses statistical approaches to understand and quantify the uncertainty that can affect study results.
Tamara Broderick first set foot on MIT’s campus when she was a high school student, as a participant in the inaugural Women’s Technology Program. The monthlong summer academic experience gives young women a hands-on introduction to engineering and computer science.
What is the probability that she would return to MIT years later, this time as a faculty member?
That’s a question Broderick could probably answer quantitatively using Bayesian inference, a statistical approach to probability that tries to quantify uncertainty by continuously updating one’s assumptions as new data are obtained.
In her lab at MIT, the newly tenured...
Please join us for this week’s CSB seminar this Wednesday 2/28, from 4-5pm in 32-124. Soojung Yang, a third-year CSB PhD student from Prof. Rafael Gomez-Bómbarelli’s group (DMSE), will be presenting her recent work on harnessing data augmentation for efficient exploration of protein conformational space. Pizza and drinks will be provided. All faculty, researchers, and students across departments and institutes are welcome!
Time & Place: Feb 28, 4-5pm in 32-124
Talk Title: Harnessing data augmentation for efficient exploration of protein conformational space
Abstract: Exploring rare events, such as protein folding, presents a computational challenge due to high energy barriers. If we can find good collective variables (CVs) that projects the protein system to a meaningful low-dimensional space, we can add bias along the CVs to flatten out the energy barrier so that the sampling is accelerated. However, without sufficient data from transition...