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My Email address is here.
A: If you are a graduate student at Duke, please come by and talk with
me and we can discuss your research interests.
If you are not, you should apply to one of the graduate programs at
Duke. At Duke all admitted students always get full funding provided
they are making adequate progress towards their degree. Unlike many
other places however we have admission systems centralized by
department, not by professor. No individual professor has any input or
control over who is admitted to any department. You must go through
the admission process if you wish to be admitted. See:
Please also see this
page for more details on applying to Duke.
Many of my students and postdocs have their own funding. You should
definitely apply for these grants and fellowships; see this list
of opportunities.
A: Any of them would work, but the usual choices are the Ph.D. program in the
Department of Computer Science or the Ph.D. Program in
Computational Biology (CBB). My computational students usually do theory,
implementation, and computational (in silico) experiments.
Computer science (CS) Ph.D. students are more
likely to be dyed-in-the-wool technologists. Computational Biology (CBB)
Ph.D. students are usually sure they want to work on biological
problems.
A: Yes, please apply. I
have both a computational group and an experimental group. I have had
experimental students in all four programs.
Q: How many students
in each of the programs are experimentalists?
A: Most of the experimental
students are in Biochemistry, SBB, or CMB. Some are in CBB. A few are in CS.
Of course, my computational and experimental students collaborate
closely, and some students do both.
A: By "experimental" I mean wet-bench (in vitro or in
vivo) experiments. In contrast, my computational students usually
do theory, implementation, and computational (in silico)
experiments.
A: Sorry, no. Our labs are set up to serve Duke students getting their
degrees here. If you want to be part of Duke please apply to be a
student here. See above.
A: If you are a graduate student at Duke, please come by and talk with
me and we can discuss your research interests.
If you are not, you should apply to one of the graduate programs at
Duke (please see above). Many prospective students seem to send
resume-style information in hopes that my research group has
"openings" to fill in the sense of a typical job. This might be true
for some research groups; however, I do not usually operate this
way. I look for top students who I think will be successful, and do my
best to bring them to Duke. Often, it is most appropriate for students
to first spend some time at Duke taking courses and/or working on
rotation projects with me before officially joining my group (meaning
that I become a thesis advisor). After a semester or two, they can
refine their interests and determine whether my research area would be
most exciting to them. This gives us the opportunity to determine
whether we are a suitable match in terms of technical background,
motivation, personality, etc.
A: Maybe. I usually want to find out:
Did you train in a great lab? Do I know your adviser and mentors? Do
you want to work on projects of central interest to my lab?
Postdocs are funded either from my
grants, or apply for
their own funding (e.g., NRSA etc). If I'm looking for a postdoc
for a particular project or with particular skills I will post that here.
I have never hired or admitted a person whom I
didn't know personally or who didn't come with very strong
recommendations from leading researchers in the field.
A: Great ones! I'm very proud of my students.
See this
list of lab alumni .
A: We use a lot of different kinds of mathematics in our work. Here
is a brief
list of some of the techniques we use; Some more details
are in
our recent papers.
A: We use a lot of different kinds of experimehts in our work.
These include cloning, mutation, expression, and purification of
proteins; stable-isotopic labeling; NMR; activity
assays and binding assays by fluorescence; kinetics (both steady-state
and pre-steady-state); stopped-flow and quenched-flow; thin-layer
chromatography; and stability (CD). We have also done X-ray
crystallography with collaborators. We do lots of computational
(in silico) experiments and predictions as well.
Some more details are in our recent papers. We
also use a variety of microfabrication techniques in MEMS and
nanofabrication (see our papers, and SMIF).
Thanks for reading my FAQ. I appreciate the interaction with people
all over the world, but hope that some of the most urgent questions
will find an answer on this FAQ.
Acknowledgments:
Rod Brooks, Karl Böhringer, Ken Goldberg, Allison
Okamura, Sebastian Thrun, ...
Department of Computer Science (CS),
for links to instructions on how to apply to the various academic
departments connected with my lab.
Department of Biochemistry (BCH),
Structural Biology & Biophysics (SBB)
Program,
Cell and Molecular
Biology (CMB) Program,
and
the Center for Computational Biology (CBB)
Please note the abbreviations above
(CS, CBB, SBB, etc.) which I will use in the sequel.
