Brown Biomed

Postdoc Advisory Panel

Below are the bios of the current members of the Postdoctoral Advisory Panel. If your department is not represented below, please contact Roberta Swanson to become a member and represent your department.

Panel Member Bio's:

  • Michael Akins (Neuro) was born in San Francisco into a military family, and hence grew up in several places, notably Virginia, Connecticut, and Maine. He received his A.B. from Princeton University, majoring in Molecular Biology, and then earned a Ph.D. from Yale University, working in the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program where he studied the anatomy and development of the mouse olfactory system. Michael remained at Yale for two years as a postdoctoral associate studying the role of cell adhesion in synapse formation. Currently, as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Justin Fallon in the Neuroscience Department, he is studying protein translation and synaptic plasticity using a mouse model of Fragile X mental retardation.
  • Kelly Aschbrenner (Community Health - Gerontology)
  • Bahar Bilgen (Ortho) is a postdoctoral research associate in the Departments of Orthopaedics and Molecular Pharmacology, Physiology & Biotechnology, as part of the Tissue Engineering team at the Center for Restorative and Regenerative Medicine, Providence Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Brown University. Bahar studied Chemical Engineering at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey (BS'98, MS'00), specializing in biochemical engineering. She joined Brown in 2006 after completing her PhD in Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston. Her research focuses on cartilage tissue engineering using novel cell sources, growth factor delivery techniques and bioreactors.
  • Theron Hamilton (MCB)
  • John Hayes (Comm. Health - Alcohol & Addiction Studies)
  • Jessie Jeyapalan (MCB), born and raised in Liverpool, UK, obtained her BSc in Molecular Biology from the University of Liverpool in 2001. She went on to complete her graduate work in the Northern Institute for Cancer Research and Institute for Aging and Health at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 2005. For her thesis research Jessie studied the role in cancer of the specialized DNA-protein complexes, known as telomeres, and was awarded Cancer Research UK Student of the Year Award 2004 for her accomplishments. Currently Jessie is a postdoctoral research associate in the lab of John Sedivy in the Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry investigating the molecular mechanisms of cellular senescence.
  • Jennifer Knies (EEB) obtained an undergraduate degree in Biology at Gettysburg College in 2002. She completed her graduate work at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where she studied the genetics of adaptation in a DNA virus. Jennifer's primary research focus is the genetics and mechanisms of adaptation, but her interests include testing and developing quantitative models for adaptation to temperature, the role of standing genetic variation in natural selection, and molecular evolution. Currently, Jennifer is as a postdoctoral research associate in the lab of Daniel Weinreich in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, where she is studying how antibiotic resistance depends on enzyme activity and stability using beta-lactamase as a model system. She is also studying whether adaptation to cold temperatures inherently constrains enzyme activity and intrinsic growth rates using phage and bacteria model systems.
  • Gurunathan Laxmikanthan (MCB) was born & raised in India, earning his Bachelor’s in Chemistry at St. Joseph’s College, Tiruchy. He received a Master’s in Chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 2001, and moved to the US to join the doctoral program in Chemistry and Biochemistry at Florida State. Guru's doctoral work focused on characterizing an important family of proteins referred as human kallikriens. Kallikriens play an important role in a variety of lethal diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis, hyper tension, breast and prostate cancer. Guru was the recipient of the Prestigious American Heart Predoctoral Fellowship and his scientific proposal received the highest score of the funding cycle. He was awarded as the “Outstanding Predoctoral Fellow of the Year” (2003) by American Heart Association, among other accolades. Guru is currently pursuing a post-doc fellowship under Dr.Arthur Landy in the Molecular, Cellular Biology & Biochemistry at Brown, researching the structural characterization of recombinogenic intermediates in order to decode the intricate aspects of Site specific recombination. Single molecule fluorescence and Cryo Electron Microscopy are being used as probes to collect mechanistic data on the complex recombinogenic systems.
  • Melissa Maginnis (MCB) was born and raised in Pennsylvania. After earning her B.S. degree in Biological Sciences from Neumann College in Aston, PA, in 2001, Melissa entered the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program at Vanderbilt University where she later joined the department of Microbiology and Immunology. She earned a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology in 2007 with her dissertation research focusing on the identification and characterization of internalization receptors for mammalian reoviruses. Currently, Melissa is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology & Biochemistry, in Walter Atwood’s laboratory, studying the molecular mechanisms of JC virus entry.
  • Andrew Mallon (MPPB)
  • Juliet Simpson (EEB)
  • David Topor (Psych)
  • Xue Wang (MPPB)