Dennis Livesay, professor and dean of the College of Computing at Michigan Technological University, will be presenting at this week’s Chemistry Seminar.
The seminar will be held in person from 3-4 p.m. Friday, Sept. 20, in Chem Sci 101.
Livesay’s presentation is titled “Does Nature Love Chemistry and Physics as Much as I Do? Integrating First-Principles and Empirical Descriptions of Protein Family Evolution.”
From the abstract:
The main goal of my research is to elucidate the molecular origins of protein family evolution. How does nature conserve function across a protein family despite significant sequence and structure variability? Conversely, what are the consequences of divergence within a family of proteins that, at a high level, do the same thing? In this presentation, I will explore these questions through the lens of protein dynamics using a combination of computational biophysics and bioinformatics methods. I will start by discussing the large and long-range impacts of single point mutations on protein dynamics, and will then introduce the idea of compensation where additional mutations can reestablish evolutionarily important features. Finally, I will conclude by applying our techniques to understand the evolutionary pressures impacting β-lactamase evolution, which underlies many antibiotic resistance mechanisms.
Livesay currently serves as the Dave House Dean of Computing at Michigan Technological University. He came to Michigan Tech with broad administrative experience and has previously had tenured/tenure-track appointments in departments of applied computing, bioinformatics, biomedical engineering, chemistry, and computer science. He received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Livesay’s research interests are in computational biophysics and bioinformatics with a specific focus on protein family sequence/structure/function relationships, especially as related to how physicochemical properties vary with evolutionary divergence. During his research career, Livesay’s lab was continuously funded by external grants, primarily from the National Institutes of Health and MedImmune, a large biotech company. He has been a grant reviewer for the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Research Corporation and the W.M. Keck Foundation, and has served on the editorial board of seven journals, including BMC Bioinformatics and PLOS Computational Biology, two of the top journals in the discipline.