(by Meghan Carpenter)

A Computational Biologist and Dartmouth professor, Alumnus Gevorg Grigoryan says his undergraduate research at UMBC was crucial to his success.

Kids typically see college as a chance to get away from their parents. That wasn’t the case with alumnus Gevorg Grigoryan ’02, Computer Science and Biochemistry, who did research with his dad in UMBC’s Computational Photonics Lab as an undergraduate. In 2000, the pair co-authored a paper proposing a new visualization technique for wave transmissions that uses color to represent amplitude and phase information.

Now an assistant professor of Computer Science and an adjunct assistant professor of Biology at Dartmouth College, Grigoryan stresses the importance of doing research early on. As an undergraduate, he worked in not one, but three, different research labs at UMBC: the Computational Photonics Lab, the VANGOGH Lab, and Dr. Daniel Fabris’ Mass Spectrometry lab.

“It was very easy for an undergrad to get involved in research [at UMBC],” says Grigoryan. “It’s not like that everywhere.”

Working in labs gave Grigoryan essential experience that shaped his career path. When it was time to pick a major, he knew that he wanted to do research like his dad, Vladimir Grigoryan, a Physicist who was working as a Research Scientist at UMBC at the time.

Grigoryan switched from Physics to an ambitious double major in Computer Science and Biochemistry when a professor told him about the emerging, interdisciplinary field of Computational Biology. Combining the principles of biology with computing techniques, the new field dealt with simulating and studying biological systems on the computer.

After graduating from UMBC in 2002, Grigoryan went to MIT for his Ph.D. in Computational Biology under Dr. Amy E. Keating. Later he completed his Post Doc at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School under William DeGrado. His research has focused on examining proteins in order to 1) understand their structure, and to 2) use that understanding to design new proteins that can do things like cure disease.

The analysis and design of proteins is what’s being done in Grigoryan’s research lab at Dartmouth. Specifically, Grigoryan and his students are looking at how protein structure dictates protein-protein recognition and the structural mechanisms of information transformation by allostery. In an interesting twist, Grigoryan now has undergraduate research assistants of his own.

As for collaborations with his dad, Grigoryan says that these days, formal collaborations are hard because of distance; Grigoryan works on molding minds in New Hampshire while his dad works at Ciena Corporation in Maryland. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop them from having heated scientific discussions over the phone, he says.

This story first appeared on UMBC’s Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department website.

A Computational Biologist and Dartmouth professor, Alumnus Gevorg Grigoryan says his undergraduate research at UMBC was crucial to his success.

Kids typically see college as a chance to get away from their parents. That wasn’t the case with alumnus Gevorg Grigoryan ’02, Computer Science and Biochemistry, who did research with his dad in UMBC’s Computational Photonics Lab as an undergraduate. In 2000, the pair co-authored a paper proposing a new visualization technique for wave transmissions that uses color to represent amplitude and phase information.

Now an assistant professor of Computer Science and an adjunct assistant professor of Biology at Dartmouth College, Grigoryan stresses the importance of doing research early on. As an undergraduate, he worked in not one, but three, different research labs at UMBC: the Computational Photonics Lab, the VANGOGH Lab, and Dr. Daniel Fabris’ Mass Spectrometry lab.

“It was very easy for an undergrad to get involved in research [at UMBC],” says Grigoryan. “It’s not like that everywhere.”

Working in labs gave Grigoryan essential experience that shaped his career path. When it was time to pick a major, he knew that he wanted to do research like his dad, Vladimir Grigoryan, a Physicist who was working as a Research Scientist at UMBC at the time.

Grigoryan switched from Physics to an ambitious double major in Computer Science and Biochemistry when a professor told him about the emerging, interdisciplinary field of Computational Biology. Combining the principles of biology with computing techniques, the new field dealt with simulating and studying biological systems on the computer.

After graduating from UMBC in 2002, Grigoryan went to MIT for his Ph.D. in Computational Biology under Dr. Amy E. Keating. Later he completed his Post Doc at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School under William DeGrado. His research has focused on examining proteins in order to 1) understand their structure, and to 2) use that understanding to design new proteins that can do things like cure disease.

The analysis and design of proteins is what’s being done in Grigoryan’s research lab at Dartmouth. Specifically, Grigoryan and his students are looking at how protein structure dictates protein-protein recognition and the structural mechanisms of information transformation by allostery. In an interesting twist, Grigoryan now has undergraduate research assistants of his own.

As for collaborations with his dad, Grigoryan says that these days, formal collaborations are hard because of distance; Grigoryan works on molding minds in New Hampshire while his dad works at Ciena Corporation in Maryland. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop them from having heated scientific discussions over the phone, he says.

This story first appeared on UMBC’s Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department website.

STATE OF MARYLAND

Department of Business and Economic Development, Office of Policy and Government Affairs

TO APPLY TO THE INTERN POSITION BELOW, visit UMBCworks.  If you do not have a resume on UMBCworks, call The Shriver Center at UMBC at 410-455-2493 for an appointment with an intern coordinator to get your resume reviewed- directions can be found here.

Available: Winter/Spring Semester - January – May 2013

Location: Baltimore, MD and Annapolis, MD (during 90-day legislative session)

Title: Policy/Legislative Intern

Salary: $9.25 - $11.25/hr. (depending on academic experience and available funds) or credit in lieu of salary

The Policy/Legislative Intern will work closely with the Director and Assistant Director for Policy and Government Affairs and assist in supporting the Department’s government relations and business outreach activities. The Intern will gain experience in the areas of advocacy, communication and policy and fiscal analysis. The Intern will have the opportunity to observe the management/operations of a principal unit of State government, adding to their public administration experience.

Primary Duties: The Intern will be responsible for or assisting with tasks including:

Conducting research on economic development issues/policies and preparing policy briefs.

Tracking Federal budget items supporting economic development.

Organizing business outreach events.

During the 90-day legislative session (January – April), the Intern will be responsible for:  

Responding to legislators’ requests for information.

Reviewing and analyzing legislation and preparing written analysis.

Conducting research on issues impacting Maryland’s business community.

Monitoring bill/budget hearings and other briefings and preparing summary documents for senior staff.

Assisting operations of the Legislative Office during the session such as preparing testimony, coordinating fiscal estimate responses and preparing briefing materials.

Assisting with Session wrap up summaries and presentations.

Course Background: The ideal candidate is a graduate or undergraduate student majoring in Political Science, Economics, Finance or Public Administration/Policy with a working knowledge of state government and legislative process or an interest in public administration, policy or legal studies. Candidates must possess excellent oral and written communication skills and strong organizational skills.

Additional Skills: The Intern must be able to work well under pressure and with minimal supervision, should possess the ability to identify, analyze and resolve problems; and work well in a team environment. Experience with Excel, Power Point, databases and Internet research is preferred but not required.

National Guard troops dispense gasoline in Queens on Saturday.
Justin Lane / EPA
NBC News

Sandy’s unprecedented devastation, particularly for the North East, shocks Americans as the city that never sleeps and the old Jersey Shore continue to struggle. Is this Al Gore’s inconvenient truth? Think again.

Union heroes saved new-borns from NYU Hospital when its generators went down.

The New York City Marathon, which brought runners from around the world was cancelled. The generators for the event were not donated to disaster victims. Some runners took to the streets to relieve New Yorkers.

McGee was on a rented bike, wearing her orange, long-sleeved official marathon jersey, pushing the pedals in her bright running shoes. She was part of a group of volunteers that had left Brooklyn’s Prospect Park a half-hour ago, on their way to assist any way they could. There were several marathoners among them, their official race numbers taped to Windbreakers and backpacks, months of training now being channeled into something urgent. McGee had witnessed firsthand the efforts after crises before. Katrina. Joplin, Mo. Pitching in on Sunday seemed like an obvious choice. “My frustration is nothing compared to what other people are feeling,” she said.

Volunteers and charities are at work, but there’s still red tape

The Red Cross doesn’t accept individual donations of household goods—these things, it says, need to be cleaned, sorted, and repackaged, and all that takes up more time than they’re worth. It asks for financial donations only. New York Cares requires its volunteers to go through orientation sessions, all of which are full till late November.

Gas tanks from the U.S. military fill the streets this weekend. Getting gas last week was met with long lines, 2-hour waits, and empty stations.

As for November 6th, word came out that New Jersey will be voting via email. Anybody got 3G?

• In many situations, people face a choice between doing something in a way that feels right, resonates, comes from the heart, makes sense, and fits the moment; or doing the thing in the way that they think they are supposed to do it. Examples: Giving a speech; proposing marriage; dealing with somebody’s emotional crisis; disciplining a child; interviewing a job candidate; responding “heroically” to a threat. More often than not, the genuine approach produces more satisfying results. And more often than not, people  instead choose to do what they think they are supposed to do. (Part of the problem is that people’s sense of what they are supposed to do comes from many sources, including media, that present the relevant situations in misleading ways. For example, the media may capture the mechanical aspects of an effective speech but not the way the words match the emotions of the moment).

• Situations take a while to play out. There’s no need to panic, or to assume that what initially seems to be true will always be true.

• People tend to overreact.

• A situation that has been imagined, read about, etc. may not be easily recognized when it becomes a real situation. This is because the feel of the imagined situation may have been very distinctive, but the real situation feels much more like every other real situation. Examples: “corruption,” “falling in love,” “heroism.”

• In many situations, a variety of motivations drive people’s choice of actions. These motivations can range from deeply spiritual to simply practical. However, over time, the more abstract motivations tend to be forgotten, and the more practical motivations remembered and acted upon. It’s hard to cling to a concept; but practicalities—deadlines, costs, etc.—are hard to forget, and create their own inertia. As a result, people repeatedly find themselves going through the motions: continuing to do things that they once made the choice to do, but without retaining any sense of connection to their deepest needs and motivations. They feel lost, and their activities provide no real sustenance.

• People are not their roles.

• Many situations apparently resolved through formal processes, such as hiring staff, or creating legislation, are really resolved through a complex combination of formal and informal processes. Very often, the informal processes—which may be unacknowledged and hidden from view—are the more important ones.

• The key to effective communication is to understand one’s audience. And a lot of people can’t or don’t bother to understand many audiences for their communications.

• People may have to hear the same good idea many times before it enters their consciousness.

• Ideas are not appreciated or rewarded in proportion to their truth, beauty, explanatory power, or even social value. Other factors typically matter more. Among them: The credentials of the idea’s originator (however arbitrary their connection to the idea); the prospect that somebody can turn a profit from the idea; and the degree to which the idea departs from, or even improves upon, accepted wisdom (the more it does, the less likely it will be appreciated and rewarded).

• Often people want things for reasons they can’t quite put their finger on. It’s just something that they feel—maybe the subtle combination of a number of subjective factors (“I want Chinese food—even though we had Chinese last night;” “I want to go home now;” “I want this job despite the fact that it pays less than the other one”). Because they are personal impulses rather than the products of reasoning, these desires can be difficult to assert or defend. In forums where a collective decision is being made, logical arguments may be favored and impulsive arguments dismissed. But the impulses are real, and their connection to people’s welfare is real as well. It is perfectly legitimate to act on such impulses, and to resist the people who try to defeat them with arguments. 

• Many actions appear to reflect clear, easily inferred motives but in fact do not. People and institutions do all sorts of things that may seem planned, polished and connected to a strategic agenda, but actually are the products of inertia, laziness, whim, jittery responses to incomplete information, or other motives more complex or confused than they seem.

• Social change happens in a gestalt—not as the result of any single well-conceived, well-executed program, policy or intervention. There is no single initiative that will save the world. This is because people, institutions, relationships and cultures are extremely complex. Any single action aimed at social change, however well-conceived and widely supported, is likely to be challenged, diverted, thwarted, misunderstood and/or misapplied in a thousand different ways. But honest, thoughtful efforts can have a cumulative effect. Slowly, person-by-person, relationship-by-relationship, they shift the underlying culture and expectations. So the good that we do is not always the immediate good that we intend.

• People express opinions for a lot of different reasons. That they really, deeply believe in what they are saying is only one of them.

• Overly zealous advocacy of a certain perspective alienates people who might otherwise have adopted that perspective in due time.

• The most insidious way to attack or undermine an idea is to call something else by its name.

• There are many situations that feel rotten, even when handled perfectly. (Examples: consoling somebody on the death of a friend; apologizing for a mistake that caused a lot of harm). So it is a mistake to assume from the rotten feeling that you have said or done the wrong thing.

• A picture left in the same place on the wall long enough will become invisible.

• Some things can be learned only through experience.

• When the true relationship between cause and effect is unknown, very simple patterns can appear vastly more complicated than they really are.

• Perceptions freeze more easily than situations. Once a person has formed a perception of a situation, he or she is likely to miss the fact that the situation has shifted subtly or gradually over time.

• Ambiguities in the early part of an arrangement can be costly to resolve. They may be the only things making the arrangement possible. Business deals, marriages, friendships—all may depend on the parties failing to reveal and resolve conflicts in their perceptions about the facts behind their transactions. If one of the parties, at the commencement of an arrangement, sees that these unresolved conflicts may exist, it can be very tempting to keep quiet about them and hope for the best. But the cost of cleaning up the messes that can arise when these conflicts come to light later, long after all parties have begun to take actions consistent with their own perceptions, can be far, far greater. In general, it is much better to name and attempt to resolve ambiguities on the front end of an arrangement rather than risk the catastrophe of having them derail the arrangement later.

• Justice is often associated with equality. “Splitting the difference” has a ring of fairness to it. Exhibiting “balance” in reporting on a situation—for example, devoting the same amount of journalistic space to each side of a controversy—seems evenhanded. But in situations in which there actually is a fundamental underlying inequality, treating people equally is fundamentally unjust. For example, if two people disagree about ten aspects of a transaction, but one of the two people is correct about all ten aspects and the other is simply lying for his or her own gain, it would be unjust to conclude that each person must be right about five of the ten sources of disagreement, or to simply “split the difference.”

• The two major sources of happiness are self-expression and love. And in truth, they are the same things.