My name is Maritza Smith-Romero, and I am nontraditional student "forced" back into academia by a spinal cord injury and a terrible job market.
I have just completed my second year in the computer science undergraduate curriculum at Southern University A&M College, in Baton Rouge Louisiana. It is the world's largest HBCU (Historically Black College/University). I am pursuing a bachelors of science degree and I have achieved and maintained a 4.0 average in my computer science classes and a 3.1 cumulative average overall.
I also completed an internship in Bioinformatics in my computer science department, with Dr. Shuju Bai. I was responsible for generating data by docking arachidonic acid to five different forms of the enzyme, Lipoxygenase, using Molsoft ICM Pro software.
Dr. Bai is also my mentor for this summer research project. It was her work in Bioinformatics that led me to her.
Dr. Bai is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Southern University. She has background in both Biology and Computer Science. Her research interests include Bioinformatics, Image processing, Indexing for XML, Data Mining, and Database Management. She is a Co-PI of a project and participates in several other projects. One of Dr. Bai's efforts is to apply computer science technology in Environmental research, pharmaceutical research and Chemistry research. She has published many papers in both biology and computer science.
General information about Dr. Bai can be found here.
Information regarding Dr. Bai's research can be found here.
I have a Bachelors of Science degree in zoology and it is my goal to use that degree in combination with a computer science degree to work in the field of Bioinformatics and computer programming.