Biographic Notes

Biographic notes on the authors

Ana Margarida Martins is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) since October 2004. She works as a Yeast Systems Biologist in the Biochemical Network Simulation Group (PI, Dr. Pedro Mendes). Previously she was a Visiting Postdoctoral Associate in the same group, from October 2002 to September 2004, after being awarded a post-doc fellowship from FCT, the Portuguese Science Foundation. In the past 2 years, Ana Martins dedicated her research time to the grant “A New Mathematical Modeling Approach to Biochemical Networks with an Application to Oxidative Stress in Yeast” (NIGMS – grant R01 GM068947-01; PI, Dr. Reinhard Laubenbacher). She organized and supervised all the initial experimental part of this study, as well as the lab work connected to transcriptomics. Currently she dedicates part of her time to the analysis of the transcriptomics data obtained in this project, and she recently began working in a new project involving enzyme kinetics and modeling of biochemical pathways. She developed teaching experience as a Ph.D. student, being involved in undergraduate and M.Sc. courses such as Enzymology, Metabolic Regulation and Metabolism and Biodiversity.
Ana Martins was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1971. She obtained her B.Sc. degree in Biochemistry from Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon in September 1994, and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry (Enzymology) from the same Faculty, in November 2000.

M. Paola Vera-Licona is a doctoral candidate in mathematics, whose focus is in mathematical biology. Her thesis research from the Virginia Tech Mathematics Department lies at the interface of mathematical biology, modeling of finite dynamical systems, discrete mathematics and computational algebra areas. Its contents include development and software implementation of mathematical algorithms as well as applications to the modeling and simulation of gene regulatory and brain response networks, using DNA microarray and fMRI data, respectively. She is currently working on part of a modeling project using techniques from discrete mathematics, computational algebra, and the theory of evolutionary algorithms. In addition to her research work, Paola has also collected considerable teaching and math education experience. As undergraduate student she participated in the “Project for the Improvement of Learning Mathematics in Basic School”, sponsored by the Mexican Mathematical Society. She received a scholarship from the Bureau of Dissemination of Science, UNAM, to participate as staff in the Sciences Museum “Universum” (Mathematics Hall), Mexico. She has also worked as assistant professor in algebra courses in Mexico as well as a sole teacher of Fresham Calculus at Virginia Tech.