A car mechanic would have a hard time building a car if he or she didn’t know anything about the car’s parts. The same holds true for scientists who want to design or program proteins and microbes. They must first understand the structure, complexity, and interactions of the system they are interested in. For Philip Romero and Ophelia Venturelli — two new assistant professors joining the Department of Biochemistry on July 11 — this idea is what drives their research.
Romero comes to UW–Madison from an assistant professorship at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Venturelli joins from a postdoc at UC Berkeley. Venturelli is interested in the functions of microbial communities and how mathematical models can be used to predict those functions.
To read more about the researchers’ work continue reading at the link below.