I would like to thank many people at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) and the Department of Biomolecular Engineering (BE) at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in particular Dr Kevin Karplus and Spencer Tu. With their supports and assistance, my experience here was very enjoyable and rewarding.

Born and raised in the island of Formosa (Taiwan), I spend my adulthood in Arizona and California. In the spring of 2002, I returned to school part-time for one quarter to finish and to defend my PhD in Molecular Biology & Biochemistry. Before then, I had been working full time as a computer programmer in private sector for a few years. I have always been interested in computer technology and life sciences. My formal education is in physical biochemistry and chemistry. But during the crazy dotcom days of the late 1990s, I was lucky and afforded the opportunity to get on-the-job programmer training in a software company located right inside the UC Irvine University Research Park. The skills I acquired then benefit me now, helping me to use computational technology and tools to solve biological questions.

My PhD is in physcial biochemistry. My doctoral work involved the study of enzyme catalysis and allosteric interaction with steady state and relaxation kinetics and equilibrium/kinetic isotope effects using various analytical spectroscopy methods, including UV/Vis, rapid kinetics, NMR and fluorescence.

In the summer of 2002, I moved from Irvine to Sunnyvale. My research at Santa Cruz focuses on protein structure prediction. My project includes to build, train and test a general Hidden Markov Model for the detection and alignment of TIM Barrel protein sequences and to determine heavy atom (carbon and nitrogen) distances from very limited ¹H NMR experimental data.