Contact: sbenz _at_ soe _dot_ ucsc _dot_ edu
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2007-Present University of California, Santa Cruz, CA
- Current Bioinformatics Ph. D. Student
2001-2005 Wheaton College (Norton, MA)
- Graduated with a major in Computer Science and minors in Biology and Chemistry
- Balfour Scholar (Merit-based scholarship) and recipient of the Fred Kollet Prize in Mathematics and Computer Science
- Completed four years on Dean’s List
- Three years as a research assistant (two as head programmer) for the Wheaton College Genomics Group, focusing on analysis of regulatory sequences
1998-2001 San Marin High School (Novato, CA)
- Completed in top 10% of class
- Assisted school district in computing issues, including setting up labs for school sites
- Self taught C programming language my Sophomore year
June 2005-Aug 2007: SurfMerchants, LLC (Boston, MA) : Developer
- Developing software in PHP/MySQL for Sassie Mystery Shopping Product
Summer 2003 & 2004: Buck Institute for Research in Aging (Novato, CA): Research Intern
- Developed research methods for internal microarray analysis using R and the Bioconductor package
- Studied the effects of multiple breast cancer drugs on tissue cultured cells
- Assisted in confocal microscopic imaging of markers in cultured cells
Summer 1999: University of California, San Francisco, CA : Cancer Center Molecular Biology Lab Assistant
- Assisted lab (PI. J. Gray, PhD) with image quantification and computer analysis of expression microarrays to determine treatment effects on RNA isolated from human breast cancer cell lines and tumor tissues.
- Programming Languages Known: C/C++, Perl, PHP, SQL, R/Bioconductor, JavaScript/HTML
- Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, MacOS
- Molecular Biology Techniques: Tissue Culture, Gel Electrophoresis, PCR, DNA-Modifying Enzymes
2002-2005 Genomics – Online Databases and Tools
- Working with Wheaton professors (biologists and computer scientists) to apply linguistic analogies to deciphering genome sequences from various organisms.
- Lead Programmer on the “favGene” project (http://aslan.wheatoncollege.edu/~favgene/)
- Faculty Advisors: Professor Mark LeBlanc, Professor Betsey Dyer
- http://genomics.wheatoncollege.edu
- Towards a DNA Dictionary. The 42nd Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology, San Francisco, CA, December 16, 2002.
- Using Regular Expressions to Locate Putative Zinc Finger Binding Sites. Consortium for Computing Science in Colleges – Northeast Region, Rhode Island College, April, 2003.
- favGene v2.0 – A Perl and MySQL system for exploring a set of favorite genes. Consortium for Computing Science in Colleges – Northeast Region, Union College, NY, April 23, 2004.
- Dyer, Betsey D., LeBlanc, Mark D., Benz, Stephen, Cahalan, Peter, Donorfio, Brian, Sagui, Patrick, Villa, Adam and Williams, Gregory (2004). A DNA motif lexicon: cataloguing and annotating sequences. In Silico Biology 4, 0039 (2004).
- Benz, S., Grossman, R., Dyer, B., and LeBlanc, M. (2004). Genomics Research and the Liberal Arts: Building a Database for Exploring Your Favorite Set of Genes (favGene v2.0). Transformations-Liberal Arts in the Digital Age, v2(1), May 2004.
http://www.colleges.org/transformations/index.php?q=node/view/80
- Histone deacetylase and proteasome inhibitors accelerate decay of unique subsets of breast cancer transcripts that include ErbB2. American Association for Cancer Research 2005 Annual Meeting, Anaheim, CA, April 17, 2005.
- Campbell M.J., Esserman L.J., Zhou Y., Shoemaker M., Lobo M., Baehner R., Kumar A.S., Adduci K., Marx C., Petricoin E.F., Liotta L.A., Winters M., Benz SC, and Benz CC. Breast Cancer Growth Prevention by Statin. J. Clinical Oncology. (submitted, 2005).
- Scott GK, Mattie MD, Berger CE, Benz SC, Benz CC. Rapid alteration of microRNA levels by histone deacetylase inhibition. Cancer Res. 2006 Feb 1;66(3):1277-81.
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