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                                                                                                      Shobha Potluri

19 Spencer Street, # 314                                                                                                                                                  Tel: 802-683-7133
Lebanon, NH 03766                                                                                                                                                        Email: potluri@cs.dartmouth.edu   
                                                                                                                                                                                         http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~potluri

Objective       
Seeking a challenging position that best utilizes my academic training and analytical skills in the area of Computational Biology and Computer Science.


Competency Area       
•    Experience in the design, development and analysis of computational algorithms to solve complex biological and chemical problems.

•    Solid programming skills to develop complex large-scale applications that harness, analyze and present biological and chemical data.

•    Strong knowledge in multivariate statistics, statistical data mining and application of statistical modeling techniques


Education
PhD (Computer Sciences),     CGPA (3.9/4.0) Dartmouth College, Hanover/NH, (Expected: Mar 07)

Thesis: Protein Complex Structural Inference by a Complete Configuration Space Analysis.

Advisors: Prof. Chris Bailey-Kellogg (Computer Science), Prof. Bruce R. Donald (Computer Science, Chemistry and Biological Sciences)

        Mutations in membrane proteins lead to a vast array of inherited and acquired diseases including Alzheimer’s. Understanding structure of membrane proteins helps design drugs to combat these diseases. This project allows for structural inference of symmetric membrane proteins.

        •    Chose targets on which traditional structure determination protocols fail due to sparseness and ambiguity in experimental data (NMR, mutagenesis, cross-linking)
        •    Developed algorithms that analyze protein complex configuration space to identify data-consistent regions
        •    Developed a probabilistic framework to infer structures of symmetric membrane proteins and identify information content in the data
        •    Developed a Java package that could be used by biologists for structure determination of symmetric homo-oligomers by NMR
        •    Adapted and extended an open source project, KStar, to handle uncertainty in monomer structure of the symmetric homo-oligomer


MS (Computer Sciences),     CGPA (3.9/4.0) Purdue University, West Lafayette/IN, Aug 03

Thesis: Geometric Algorithms for High Throughput Protein Structure Determination

Advisors: Prof. Chris Bailey-Kellogg (Computer Science), Prof. Alan M. Friedman (Biological Sciences)

       This work facilitates rapid protein structure determination essential for key post-genomic tasks such as modeling molecular cell functionality and applications like drug design.
        •    Obtained experimental data (from cross-linking and mutagenesis) for target protein
        •    Developed geometric algorithms to obtain corresponding data from each of the target protein models
        •    Discriminated protein models by comparing experimental data with computational data
        •    Developed a C++ package using Computational Geometry Algorithm Library (CGAL)


BTech (Computer Sciences), CGPA (4.0/4.0) KLCE, India, April 01


Work Experience
Research Assistant, Computational Biology Laboratory, Dartmouth College (Jul 04-present)
•    In collaboration with Prof. James Chou, Dept. of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Harvard Medical School.

Teaching Assistant, Computer Science Department, Dartmouth College (Winter 06)
•    Programming Languages: grading of course projects

Co-advisor, Women in Science Project (WISP) intern, Dartmouth College (Fall and Spring 05)
•    Supervised a freshman student on a research project involving prediction of complex structure by analysis of intermolecular distances

Research Assistant
, Computational Biology Laboratory, Purdue University (May 02-Jun 04)
•    In collaboration with Prof. Alan Friedman, Dept. of Biological Sciences, Purdue University

Research Assistant
, project funded by the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), Purdue University  (Aug 01– May 02)
•    Developed and implemented “An Integrated Agent-based Architecture for Optimal Security Profile Generation”. In collaboration with Krannert School of Management.



Computer Skills
Languages:                     C/ C++, Java, Python, Oz, Tcl/Tk
Operating Systems:        Linux, Xinu, Windows, Mac OS X
Databases:                      SQL, MySQL, Oracle
Statistical Tools:             R, Matlab 
Visualization Tools:       VMD, Rasmol, Pymol, Molmol
Libraries:                        Posix Threads, BSD Sockets
Profilers:                        GDB
IDE:                               Netbeans, Visual Studio
UI:                                 Java Swing, QT


Course Work
Core Computer Science: Algorithm Design, Analysis and Implementation, Operating Systems, Compilers, Numerical Linear Algebra, Internetworking, Advanced Cryptography

Computational Biology related: Computational Biology, Machine Learning and Data Mining, Database Systems, Distributed Database Systems, Simulation and Modeling of Computer Systems, Statistical Issues in Data Mining, Statistical Pattern Recognition, Analytical Informatics, Computational biology journal club


Publications
S. Potluri, A.K. Yan, J.J. Chou, B.R. Donald, C. Bailey-Kellogg. Structure Determination of Symmetric Homo-oligomers by a Complete Search of Symmetry Configuration Space Using NMR Restraints and van der Waals Packing, Proteins, 65(1), 2006.

S. Potluri, A.K. Yan, B.R. Donald, C. Bailey-Kellogg. A Complete Algorithm to Resolve Ambiguous NOE Restraints in Structure Determination of Symmetric Homo-oligomers, Protein Science, 2006. (Submitted for review.)

S. Potluri, A.K. Yan, J.J. Chou, B.R. Donald, C. Bailey-Kellogg. Structure Determination of Symmetric Homo-oligomers by a Complete Search of Symmetry Configuration Space Using NMR Restraints and van der Waals Packing, Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), 2006.

S. Potluri, A.A Khan, A. Kuzminykh, J.M. Bujnicki, A.M. Friedman, and C. Bailey-Kellogg. Geometric analysis of cross-linkability for protein fold discrimination. Pac. Symp. Biocomp (PSB), 2004, 447-58



Posters
“Structure Determination of Symmetric Homo-oligomers by a Complete SCS Search using NMR Restraints and vdW Packing”, PSI (Protein Structure Initiative), NIH, Bethesda, Apr 06

“Molecular Symmetry as an Aid to Homo-oligomeric Protein Structure Determination by NMR, using Sparse Inter-molecular NOE Restraints”, 13th annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), Detroit, Jun 05

“Protein Structure Discrimination by Clustering of Mutagenesis Data”, 26th annual Midwest Biopharmaceutical Statistics Workshop, Ball State University, May 2003.

“Algorithms for Protein Structure Determination using Cross Linking and Mass Spectrometry”, INGEN (Indiana Genomics Initiative) Proteomics Symposium, Nov 02

“Behavior Based System for Generation of Security Solutions”, Annual CERIAS Research Symposium, Apr 02


Achievements and Awards
Submitted structure of Phospholamban, a cardiac muscle protein to the Protein Data Bank (PDB) with PDB ID 2HYN, 06

Referee for IEEE Computational Systems Bioinformatics (CSB), 05

Talk on “Geometric algorithms for measuring distances in protein cross-linking", 9th Purdue University Biophysics Symposium (PUBS-9), Oct 03

“Ice Miller Graduate Student Scholarship Award”, 03, awarded to one in a class of over a hundred students

Representative of the Computer Science Dept at the Graduate Student Board (GSB), Purdue University (Aug’02 – Aug’04)

Chairman of the IEEE Chapter, KLCE, India (Jul 00 – Apr 01) (responsible for its organization)

“Best Outgoing Undergraduate Student Award”, India, 01, awarded to one in a class of 60 students

Chief Coordinator of “Infovision”, a national level technical symposium organized at KLCE, India, 01


References
Available on request