20220402

 

Congratulations to Darian!

 

Mr. Darian Yang, a 3rd year PhD student in the MBSB graduate program, co-mentored by Dr. Lillian Chong and Dr. Angela Gronenborn, recently published his first-author paper, “Development and Validation of Fluorinated, Aromatic Amino Acid Parameters for Use with the AMBER ff15ipq Protein Force Field” in the Journal of Physical Chemistry A. In MBSB, some students have co-mentors formally or informally. We interviewed him on what is an advantage of having two dissertation advisors. Darian commented “Being in a co-mentorship can be really rewarding. I think one of the biggest advantages is that I can really define my own research direction. In my experience, most grad students, at least initially, will work on projects defined by their PI or an active grant proposal. My situation was a bit more unique, I sat down with Angela and Lillian and proposed various ideas to them of what I wanted to work on. Almost two years later and after a lot of refinement, I’m still pursuing one of those ideas as my main thesis project.”.

Check out his paper! https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpca.2c00255

 

 

By MBSB