As an undergraduate student, Parisa Hosseinzadeh was trained as a molecular biologist. Her interest in proteins led to her graduate research on the rational design of metalloproteins in the lab of Dr. Yi Lu at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of David Baker at the Institute for Protein Design, she helped develop new computational tools to design cyclic peptides and used these peptides as specific inhibitors to target enzymes/proteins.

Parisa is a computational biochemist invested in developing new tools to enhance human life, especially through structure-guided rational protein/peptide design and the use of large data.

The current areas of focus in her lab are: 

1. Gaining structural understanding of peptide behavior in solution: Peptides are small stretches of amino acids that play important roles in many cellular functions such as signaling and defense. Due to their small size, they can take different conformations in solution. We will use a data-driven computational approach to sample these conformations and use this conformational ensemble to predict energetics of peptides functions such as binding. 

2. Development of peptide and protein biosensors: Diagnosis is the first step of fighting diseases. We use engineered proteins and peptides with high stability as a detection module for development of accessible diagnostics. We use a combination of computational methods and directed evolution to obtain peptides and proteins that can bind to targets of interest such as surface proteins on pathogens or serum metabolites. 

To learn more about our group, visit our webpage. 

parisah 'at' uoregon.edu