Previous Research Projects

This is a list of most of the semi-formal research projects I've embarked on, in more or less chronological order. No offense is intended toward any groups or individuals. I hope this collection will convince you that I have learned quite a lot, as a result of these projects, regardless of the fact that I rarely succeeded to fulfill my original goals for the project.

I have worked:

by myself, in my kitchen when I was in high school, on an experiment to see how much white cane sugar I could dissolve in water. I started with a cup of hot water, and ended up using up so much sugar, I had to stop the project, because I was afraid my mother would be mad at me for using it all up. Conclusions? Sugar is so soluble in water, you might as well say that water is soluble in sugar.
with Dr. John Castellot, who is a professor at Tufts University in Boston, Mass, on cataloging the developmental stages of chicken embryos.. I also learned how to pass cells, was introduced to "the sterile technique" by Benjamin Caleb, John's cool technician, and ate great chinese food (Tufts medical school is right in the middle of China Town, or so it seemed).
in the Botany Dept., with Dr. Ullrich and Amy (something), a grad student there. For one semester, I bonded with Schizophyllum Communae (I'm not sure if I spelled that correctly), a nice promiscuous tree-rotting fungus. We allowed different strains to "mate" or interact in a controlled way on little petri dishes, and long hours were spent examining the micilia, to see if "patch-clamp" connections had formed. I only worked their as a preliminary project, and don't remember exactly why we were observing these mating behaviors..
with Issy Laher, a professor in the Pharmacology department at UVM. We did a short summer project comparing the response of blood vessels in various tissues of the white rabbit, to caffeine and other common drugs.
with (watched) Dr. Beth Hart in the Biochemistry Dept. at UVM, for about two weeks, and watched her expose cute fuzzy (surprisingly calm) big fat ol' white rats to an aerosol containing cadmium, a heavy metal. Her group eventually did odd things to the lungs of these rats (without their permission), to examine the tissue for cadmium-induced changes (and boy, were there changes!). The whole lab was bent on studying metallothionine (spelling is up for grabs), a protein (I believe) that I don't know very much about anymore. I watched her work, passed a few cells, but decided that even though the results were interesting, in a morbid sort of way, I wasn't really interested in learning those methods.
I spent the summer of 1994 at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, AR. There, I worked with Dr. Hinton's research group, and synthesized an analog of a protein called Gramicidin. We did experiments to determine what effect our single-amino acid substitution had on the final conformation of the folded protein. I wrote a brief report at the end, and presented my research to other summer ressearchers, and to the faculty of the Chemistry Department there.
with Lori Stevens, a very cool professor in the Zoology dept. at UVM, sexing, counting, and mating flour beetles (well, okay, they mated themselves... but the matches were set up by us!)
with Dr. Chris Francklyn in the Biochemistry Department, on a short project described here.
with Dr. Karen Sentell, when she was still at UVM (she resigned in the spring of 1995 and took a job with CIBA Vision in Atlanta, Georgia), reading about cyclodextrins their inclusion complexes, in relation to capillary electrophoresis. I also trained a bit on our 500 mHz (Bruker) NMR here at UVM, with a grad student in Sentell's research group, who has since left UVM and gone to another school somewhere far away.
with Dr. Jewett and Dr. Bushweller, professors in the Chemistry Department at UVM, on a molecular mechanics project.
with Dr. Barbara Lyons, my boss, on several ongoing projects, including exploring the structure, function and binding properties of parts of the GABA-A receptor in the brain, exploring the structural recognition events involved in the complex of a mutant Tick Anticoagulant Peptide with factor Xa (a blood clotting factor), and studying the structure and folding of several small peptides corresponding to the cytoplasmic tail of the beta-3 integrin protein. Whoo! I will describe our research in more detail some other day. :-) The technique we are most fond of is liquid state NMR, but we dabble in molecular biology and chromatography, in order to get the job done.