by Helen Hill for CBIOMES
A warm welcome to doctoral student Stephen Blaskowski who joins Ginger Armbrust’s UW CBIOMES Group this month.
Stephen is a molecular engineering student with a background in synthetic biology interested in developing statistical and computational methods for inferring the metabolic functions of enzymes found in marine plankton species. He is particularly interested in pathways relevant to the development of novel, sustainable, bio-derived materials, and key pathways involved in ocean biogeochemical cycles.
For CBIOMES, Stephen will be working with metatranscript data from several cruises in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, in particular, the use of network models for inferring the biochemical pathway membership of un-characterized and under-characterized marine microbial enzymes. In the future he hopes to incorporate additional sequence, phylogeny, and chemical data to improve the performance of these models.
Story image: In his spare time Stephen says he enjoys hiking and backpacking with his partner, cooking, traveling to new places, and watching Netflix with his two cats.