Biography: Bonnie Kirkpatrick

Montana State University is where I've spent the last 3 years of my life. Majoring in Computer Science and minoring in both French and Math have kept me quite busy. Of course, I've had time for more than just taking classes, as this Web site will witness.

The summer of 2001, I divided my time between two research projects. The first was the application of semistructured databases to data obtained from experiments on crickets at the Center for Computational Biology with Dr. Gwen Jacobs. Our goal was to create a database system whose schemas could be written by the average scientific user, thus eliminating the need for employing a database administrator. This work led to me attending Supercomputing 2001, where I learned about the DMP program. The second project I worked on that summer was regarding protein structure determination with Dr. Brendan Mumey. This research involved taking data we had obtained from epitopes on the protein's surface and mapping it to the one dimensional residue sequence. In this way, we were able to discover constraints that described the folded protein.

College Station, TX was the highlight of last summer (2002). I spent 10 weeks there studying protein and RNA folding landscapes with Dr. Nancy Amato, Guang Song, and Xinyu Tang. Read all about it on last summer's web page. Apparently the heat didn't make a big enough impression on me, because I'm once again back in College Station for another summer of research.

For questions or comments, email bkirk@cs.tamu.edu.