Postdoctoral Fellow

Vanessa Ortiz Dept. of Chemical and Biological Engineering Faculty Supervisor: Juan de Pablo Email: vortiz@cae.wisc.edu

Dr. Vanessa Ortiz's postdoctoral research is focused on studies of protein misfolding and aggregation. These are believed to play an important role in a number of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases. Several of these are linked to expanded glutamine residues. My research focus is development of quantitative, molecular models of the early stages of Huntington aggregation and fibril formation. These models will be accompanied by experimental work aimed at verifying key predictions of our calculations. I will use transition path sampling to investigate the critical steps involvedin polyglutamine folding and aggregation, using more efficient algorithms. The insights gained from this work will lead to a better understanding of the early stages of Huntington's and simliar diseases, and might provide the basis for therapeutic approaches.

CV

2007 CV (.pdf format)

Publications

Search for publications by Vanessa Ortiz (Pub Med)

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File last modified: August 13, 2003
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