Nicholas Lorig-Roach

MS student, Bioinformatics
University of California, Santa Cruz

B.S. Chemistry and Neuroscience w Bioinformatics
University of California, Santa Cruz

Research Interests

I am interested in developing new antibiotics, antivirals, and cancer therapeutics.

Natural product biosynthesis is another passion (and historically
the source of the above medicines). I find the evolution of the mind and
conciousness amazing and enjoy borderline philosophical physics questions
like: "What are the mechanisms for choice?"

I'm currently a student with the school of engineering, where I currently
work with Prof. Rebecca Dubois doing protein engineering of a virus' capsid
to develop a detection method and potentially vaccine.

I also work with Professor Phil Crews in the chemistry department at UCSC.
The lab studies marine natural products, and in particular we aim to discover
new cytotoxic small molecules produced by sea sponges and Gram-negative bacteria.*

Currently, my skills include chromatography and structural elucidation of small
organic molecules by mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)
experiments. I can do a little microbiology and protein engineering, and have basic
programming knowledge in Python, C, and Java.

*Really 'anything but cyanobacteria and actinobacteria' which are the two most commonly studied bacterial phyla
in the realm of natural products. In practice, we have primarily isolated members of bacteriodes and proteobacteria.