CAM Colloquium - Erik Thiede, Cornell University "Towards Quantitative Heterogeneity Analysis from Cryo-EM"

Description

Title: Towards Quantitative Heterogeneity Analysis from Cryo-EM

Abstract: Many biological molecules are structurally heterogeneous, moving between many possible structures to perform their biological functions.  Recently, there has been considerable interest in using Cryogenic-sample electron microscopy (CryoEM) to analyzing this structural heterogeneity.  In this talk, I will first present an overview of this new research area.  In the first half, I will cover the scientific and mathematical basics underlying CryoEM and protein conformational heterogeneity.  In the second, I will present our ongoing research that casts the analysis of Cryo-EM data as a Bayesian inverse problem, which we then attempt to solve by integrating structural modeling tools into the recovery pipeline.

Bio: I'm an Assistant Professor at Cornell University Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, having started Summer 2023. You can find my lab research website here.

Broadly speaking, my research area is theoretical and computational chemistry. This means that theoretically speaking, I can both use computers and do chemistry. I received my PhD working with Profs. Aaron Dinner and Jonathan Weare on enhanced sampling algorithms for molecular dynamics. Currently, I spend most of my time thinking about how we can take biomolecules and biomolecular data, feed them into a computer, and get scientific insight back out. Download my CV.