March 2012: Dr. Livesay and former lab member Dr. David La were quoted in a recent NINER Times article on FoldIt, which is an online game about protein folding. The article can be found here.

January 2012: Dr. Livesay and Dr. Jacobs have been awarded a UNC Charlotte Faculty Research Grant to study substrate specificity mechanisms in the GABA transporter protein.

December 2011: Dr. Livesay has been added to the editorial board of the Journal of Proteome Science and Computational Biology.

December 2011: Congratulations to former lab member David La for successfully defending his Biology PhD dissertation at Purdue. Also, belated congratulations to Brian Sutch for completing his PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences at USC earlier in the year. The two of them are coauthors on one of the lab's most cited papers.

November 2011: Dr. Tong Li has accepted a post-doctoral research position in the group. Currently, Dr. Li is working at the Qingdao Insitute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Welcome Tong!

October 2011: Former lab member Eric Chea successfully defended his PhD dissertation in pharmacology at Cornell. He has accepted a position at the FDA. Congratulations Eric!

August 2011: Dr. Livesay and Dr. Jacobs have been awarded an industrial research contract to study the stability of antibody structures using the DCM.

July 2011: Luis Gonzalez has successfully defended his PhD dissertation. He has accepted a Computer Science faculty position at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua in Mexico. Congratulations Luis!

July 2011: Former lab member Dr. Dukka KC has accepted a position with SRA International as a scientific programmer/bioinformatics analyst, supporting the Center for Information Technology at the National Institutes of Health. Congratulations Dukka!

March 2011: Dr. Livesay has been named as an associate editor of PLoS Computational Biology.

February 2011: Congratulations to Dr. Chuanbin Du, who has accepted a post-doc position in Dr. Su's lab. Chuanbin will continue working with us till June.

January 2011: It's official! The Bioinformatics and Computational Biology PhD program has now been approved by the UNC Board of Governers.

December 2010: Dr. Livesay has been named as an associate editor of BMC Bioinformatics.

December 2010: Congratulations to Deep for passing his dissertation proposal.

November 2010: Dr. Livesay is now on the editorial boards of Advances in Bioinformatics, Current Protein and Peptide Science and Protein and Peptide Letters.

October 2010: Congratulations to Hui for getting a job at Goldman Sachs. You will be missed, but Wall Street should be a very interesting place to work.

July 2010: Congratulations to Luis for passing his dissertation proposal. All that remains is the dissertation defense...and, of course, a lot of work.

May 2010: Dr. Livesay has won the 2010 College of Computing and Informatics Outstanding Faculty Research Award.

April 2010: A team of UNC-Charlotte investigators led by Dr. Livesay have received nearly half a million dollars to purchase a high performance computing cluster for computational biology research. This S10 equipment grant is from the NIH, and is part of the ARRA stimulus funding.

April 2010: Dr. Jacobs and Dr. Livesay have recieved an ARRA administrative supplement grant from the NIH to continue our FAST development efforts, which is our second generation DCM software.

March 2010: Ehsan Tabari has developed miniMINER for us, which is a streamlined and self-contained tool to identify phylogenetic motifs. miniMINER can be downloaded from Sourceforge.

January 2010: Ivetth Corona de la Fuente is visiting us for the semester. Ivetth is a MS student in computer science at CICESE (Ensenada, Baja California). While here, she will be taking classes on protein structure and bioinformatics, as well as working on her dissertation.

October 2009: Eric Alsop, a former student in the lab while we were still in California, has entered the Systems Biology program at UC-Merced. Good luck Eric!

October 2009: Dukka KC has accepted a post-doctoral position at NIH in Bethesda, MD. Good luck Dukka; you will be missed.

August 2009: We have officially moved into the new Bioinformatics building.

May 2009: Congratulations to Deep for passing his qualifying exam.

April 2009: Dr. Livesay has received tenure.

January 2009: Congratulations to Luis for passing his qualifying exam.

November 2008: Congratulations to Deep for winning a travel award to the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society from the Center for Biomedical Engineering at UNC-Charlotte.

October 2008: It's official! We are now our very own department, called the Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics.

August 2008: The alpha-version of our Catalog of Important Sites protein functional site benchmark has been released. Click here to access the dataset.

May 2008: Andrei Istomin has accepted a post-doctoral position in Adam Godzik's lab at the Burnham Institute. Our loss is La Jolla's gain. Good luck Andrei; you will be missed.

May 2008: Chuanbin Du, who is currently finishing his PhD in Numerical Analysis & Applications, will be joining the lab as a post-doctoral researcher in August. Welcome Chuanbin!

May 2008: After completing his rotations, Deeptak Verma (aka, Deep) has decided to officially join the lab. After completing his current rotation project into predicting lysozyme mutant stability, Deep will be using the DCM and other biophysical approaches to characterize protein functional sites. Welcome back Deep!

March 2008: See the new Biomolecular Physics Group photo here. Front row (from left): Christina Baciu, Mike Fairchild, Jenny Farmer, Dukka Bahadur, Don Jacobs, Dennis Livesay, Charles David, and Deeptak Verma. Second row (from left): Minli Xu, Andrei Istomin, Jim Mottonen, Yildirim Aktas, and Luis Carlos Gonzalez. Also, the Bioinformatics Research Center photo is here.

January 2008: Cristina Baciu and Minli Xu have have each joined the lab to do a research rotation. Cristina will be comparing the results of the mDCM to a Go-like model, whereas Minli is developing and applying methods to quantitiatively compare H-Bond networks across protein structure pairs.

December 2007: BioMed Central has been constructing advertising posters for each of their journals from images published within that particular journal. The poster for BMC Bioinformatics features an image from our recent paper on network centrality-based predictions of enzyme catalytic sites (see poster here). Posters for the others journals can be found at the BioMed Central website.

November 2007: After completing his rotations, Luis Carlos Gonzalez has decided to join the lab. To begin with, Luis Carlos will be generalizing the Pebble Game algorithm and working on development of our new Distance Constraint Model.

October 2007: A recent survey of CiteULike indicates that eight of our papers are included in peoples' libraries, most mulitple times.

August 2007: Deeptak Verma has joined the lab to do a research rotation. Deeptak is a new Bioinformatics PhD student. Welcome!

July 2007: See us working hard here.

June 2007: Luis Carlos Gonzalez has joined the lab to do a research rotation. Luis Carlos is a new Bioinformatics PhD student. Welcome!

March 2007: Dr. Dukka Bahadur has joined the lab. He will be working on protein functional site prediction techniques. Welcome!

Mach 2007: Swati has succesfully defended her M.Sc. thesis. Congratulations Swati!

Mach 2007: Lab alumnus Julie Kanjanapangka has been accepted into the Ph.D. program at City of Hope. Congratulations Julie!

October 2006: Dr. Livesay has been appointed the Biomacromolecules Section Editor for Chemistry Central Journal, which is a broad ranging chemistry journal published by Chemistry Central. Chemistry Central is a new open access publishing effort by the same people that publish Bio Med Central.

August 2006: We have now officially moved to the Bioinformatics Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

June 2006: Starting in August 2006, Dr. Livesay will be formally moving the lab to the Bioinformatics Research Center at UNC-Charlotte. Thanks to Swati and Julie for organizing my going away party. And thanks to everyone but Eric for not hitting me in the face with pie. Pictures from the party are here.

June 2006: Swati Pande was recently awarded the Academic Merit Scholarship from the Cal Poly Pomona International Center. Congratulations Swati!

April 2006: Eric Chea recently accepted his offer to attend the Pharmacology Ph.D. program at Cornell University. Eric was also accepted to several other top programs across the country. Congratulations Eric!

April 2006: Congratulations to everyone in my Fall 2004 Chm416 (Macromolecular Modeling) class. Our class project has now been accepted for publication in Journal of Chemical Theory and Computatation, which is an American Chemical Society journal.

February 2006: It's taken very little time for David La, who left the lab in August 2005, to start impressing on a bigger stage. David recently won first place (out of 120 participants) at the 2006 Purdue University Sigma Xi Graduate Research Poster Competetion. David's poster laid out a plan to extend phylogenetic motifs, which is what he worked on here at Cal Poly Pomona, to predict protein-protein interactions. Congratulations David!

January 2006: The W.M. Keck Foundation has awarded the Center for Macromolecular Modeling & Materials Design a $500,000 grant to fund the second phase of CM3D development. Dr. Livesay, along with several others, is one of the founding members of the CM3D and one of the grant proposal's co-authors. The CM3D is featured in the most recent issue of the PolyTrends magazine.

December 2005: Dr. Livesay's and Dr. Jacobs' (from UNC-Charlotte) NIH-R01 grant proposal has been funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The main goal of this proposal is to develop the next generation of the Distance Constraint Model (DCM), which is a unique biophysical modeling scheme that harmoniously calculates stability and flexibility metrics. The title of the proposal is: Predicting protein flexibility and stability.

November 2005: Dr. Livesay's Joint Venture Grant proposal (along with Agiline, Inc.) has been funded by the California State University Program for Education and Research in Biotechnology (CSUPERB). The main goal of the grant is to develop the next generation of phylogenetic motif identification software. This work will be performed in Bangalore, India, and also serves as a test case for off-shoring bioinformatic-related tasks. The title of the proposal is: Phylogenetic Similarity Maximization: a new algorithm for phylogenetic motif identification.

July 2005: Congratulations to Eric Chea for being selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Undergraduate Research Fellow.

March 2005: Dr. Livesay's bioinformatics short-course at Technology Park Malaysia was featured in one of the leading English language newspapers in Kuala Lumpur.

February 2005: Our paper in Proteins: Sequence, Structure, and Bioinformatics has been selected be featured on the cover of the periodical.

January 2004: David La won the 2004 CSUPERB Don Eden Graduate Research Award. A brief account of David's award was included in PolyTrends.

October 2003: NSF awards grant to Cal Poly Pomona for high performance computing cluster.

July 2003: Dr. Livesay's and Dr. Jacob's (CSU-Northridge) Joint Venture Grant proposal (along with Cengent Therapeutic, Inc) has been funded by the California State University Program for Education and Research in Biotechnology (CSUPERB). The title of the proposal is: Bioinformatic study correlating protein flexibility with function.

July 2002: Congratulations to Melanie Silver and David La (both who are undergraduate students) for winning 1 of 10 poster awards at the 16th Symposium of the Protein Society.

January 2002: Dr. Livesay's grant proposal to the NIH-SCORE program has been funded. The title of the propoal is: Investigation of superoxide dismutase surface electrostatics.

May 2001: Dr. Livesay's grant proposal to the American Chemical Society-Petroleum Research Fund has been funded. The title of the proposal is: Conferring thermostability to mesophilic protein structures through systematic mutation of surface residues.