 Well, it's my pleasure to introduce, as everyone's getting set up here, Professor Tammy Kinzer-Ursa. Many of you know Tammy as an outstanding collaborator across campus. As background, she's a native from Ohio. She got her undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Toledo and then her master's and PhD at the University of Michigan, but we first found Tammy when she was a post-doctoral fellow out at Caltech studying of all things biology. And you'll see quite a diverse talent set here in terms of the projects she works on. She joined us in 2013 as an assistant professor and was promoted recently to associate professor. She now holds our Marta Gross, named Professorship in Biomedical Engineering as an Associate Professor. She's also the director of our undergraduate programs, and so many of you have interfaced with her on the educational front. She's a very dedicated teacher and mentor and developer of curriculum in all different ways, especially hands-on laboratories of which we're most appreciative of. Her research is at the intersection of a number of things. I see it as biochemistry and systems biology and of course with an engineering platform, but the application areas are remarkably broad and so if you see Tammy's publications, they range from systems biology publications where she's looking at protein networks inside cells and how that maps into cellular behavior to point-of-care diagnostic systems in rural areas that provide medical information and rapid and useful ways. And all of that is based on both her engineering fundamentals and a really broad knowledge of molecular and cellular biology. So with that, welcome here today and we're delighted to have you present. Thank you so much, George. Thank you. It is a real pleasure to be able to present my work to you today. So I'm going to basically reiterate what George just introduced in a, excuse me, okay, we're going to get rid of that, now the whole thing's frozen. We're going to get rid of the technology, there we go, okay. So I'm a native of Ohio, as George mentioned, I grew up in a small blue-collar community called Hicksville, Ohio, I swear that's the name, I have photographic evidence, Hicksville, Ohio, it's about two and a half hours from here just outside of Fort Wayne actually, we used to go to Fort Wayne, Indiana, it was the closest biggest city. I was the first one in my family to attend college, so I went off to the University of Toledo where I started as a double major in chemistry in German and it wasn't until about my junior year that the University of Toledo started a bioengineering program. I went to meet with the head there, Ron Fornir, who ended up becoming the dean of engineering at University of Toledo and his vision for the department, his vision for bioengineering for collaborative research really spoke to me and so I immediately transferred and have been set then on a course towards bioengineering, bio-molecular engineering ever since. I mentioned that in that meeting, which was supposed to be 15 minutes, turned out to be an hour and a half, that I was interested in undergraduate research. He immediately said I could work with him or I could work with anyone in the department and he walked me down the hall and introduced me to all of the faculty that were in this burgeoning bioengineering program and I ended up doing undergraduate research with one of them, Jeff Johnson, in the area of neurological engineering and neural networks and that completely changed my career trajectory and I really hope that I am such an enthusiastic mentor and role model for my students as they were for me so I really have and the picture that you see up there is I was given a distinguished alumni award from the University of Toledo just a few years ago and it's been incredibly rewarding. From there I went just up the road to Ann Arbor, Michigan, got my PhD in chemical engineering. At the time there was not very many people working on molecules and cells and what I call kind of the small side of biomedical engineering in biomedical engineering programs. They were just getting started across the United States and I wanted to look at the molecular level that was occurring in chemical engineering at the time. So I ended up in Jennifer Linderman's lab and this receptors book here became my Bible. This was written by Jennifer Linderman and Doug Lauffenberger and it was one of the first works that demonstrated that you can use dynamical systems, transport equations, chemical reactions, reaction refusions equations and apply it to cellular systems and my work as you'll see has really taken a lot of that and applied it now to neuroscience which I learned at the California Institute of Technology. So I went to Caltech, I wanted to pick an important physiological problem, learning and memory really piqued my interest and I ended up in a molecular neuroscience lab there. My PhD advisor Mary Kennedy had identified many of the proteins that are involved in synaptic transduction and synaptic plasticity so if you remember anything of this talk it's because proteins inside your hippocampus are constantly moving and interacting and changing the strengths of the synapses. We then took applied systems dynamics and applied it to those protein networks that are involved in learning and memory. After I finished my postdoc I went to Maven Biotechnologies where I was developing a protein-protein interaction system with the startup company I was employee number four. That was an incredibly rewarding experience and was amazing training for starting up my lab here at Purdue. So you'll see when I present my work that I've been able to take all of these experiences and build a research program here to do this, it's been incredibly rewarding. I get to work with amazing students, graduates and undergraduates, an amazing set of colleagues at the Weldon School and it's again my pleasure to highlight some of this work for you today. So my lab is affectionately known as the TKU lab because not everybody wants to say Kinzer Ersem all the time. So my students, not to my face but they say TKU, Professor TKU. So we're the TKU lab and we work on a number of different areas. We work in computational biology, we do some protein labeling and protein engineering and we've also gotten into biosensing. And I think you'll be able to see how my different experiences from the University of Michigan in neuroscience and at a startup company has informed everything that I am doing. While you really work on the whole spectrum of these, in these areas, I'm going to highlight just three different, three different areas for you today. We'll get off that slide. Okay. So the first one is our work in computational biology. We're really studying the molecular mechanisms of learning and memory. So I mentioned those synapses in your brain, the axons are coming in and making synapses on your dendrites. There's millions of neurons in your brain, trillions of synaptic connections. And those synaptic connections are constantly rewiring their strengths. So those connections are weakening and they're strengthening based on previous neuronal activity. The fundamental unit of that are these yellow guys here. These are synaptic spines and they're physically shrinking and growing, new receptors and new molecules are being inserted. If you zoom in a little bit, you can see that these structures are about 400 nanometers in size. But they're incredibly heterogeneous. So you'll see this is a presynaptic buton here. And we've been really focusing on the other end of that, this heterogeneous structure here, which is a post-synaptic spine. And it is full of proteins, receptors, scaffolding proteins that are all interacting dynamically, changing in spatial location, changing in strength as you learn. We've applied sets of ordinary differential equations. This is just a generic set of differential equations to understand how these protein species are changing in concentration in time. We've looked at these networks both in isolation, which is what people normally do. But we've also taken a view of identifying particular limiting resources within these structures. So calcium comes flooding into the cell at different frequencies. And the strength of the synapse is then a function of that calcium flux frequency. It turns out that if you view this calcium as a rate limiting resource, you get very different dynamic behavior. So what we see is in a competitive network, the frequency dependence of these proteins changes and shifts and tightens and can be explained only with competition in absence of feedback networks, feedforward networks, and spatial localization that other people have used. So we really think that competitive tuning, which is what we're calling this phenomenon, is a way to explain network behavior. We are also using agent-based models to describe some of these systems where we can reconstruct the spine and watch the molecules move in space and time. This has given us different predictions about how calcium and commodulin are contributing to learning and memory at the fundamental molecular level. To switch gears, I'll talk a little bit about our protein engineering techniques. Imagine if you could have a window into embryonic development. If you could look in and identify the subcellular structures that are being laid down during development, if you could identify the proteins that are being made and distributed throughout that mouse or that embryo, it would be an amazing boon for understanding normal development, for understanding developmental disorders, and for understanding disease progression. And that motivation led us to develop this technique called non-canonical amino acid labeling, where we take non-natural amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. We introduce them to a pregnant female mouse, and those non-natural amino acids get incorporated into the normal translational machinery of the cell and incorporated into proteins. So where you had a normal methionine previously, you now have, say, an azidohomo alanine, which is the non-natural amino acid, and you have a chemical handle with which you could isolate those proteins during very short windows of time, so, say, six hours or 12 hours of development. We isolate them, and then we use shotgun proteomics to identify what they are. These techniques have all developed here at Purdue and are being now used widely in many different fields from cancer to neurobiology to development, and these are just some of the data we can show that we have differential regulation of those proteins, and then we can track them in time in different cellular fractions, extracellular matrix, the nucleus and the cytoskeletal fraction. One last piece is our work in biosensing. So this was work done with Steve Worley, where the motivation really was the disproportionate burden that developing low and middle income countries have in infectious disease. We developed a particle diffusometry technology that basically uses diffusion of nanoparticles as a readout and are using the viscosity term in the Stokes-Einstein equation as a molecular detector. So DNA amplifies, let's say there's a cholera toxin gene or a malaria gene in the sample. The DNA amplifies only if you have that pathogen, and this particle diffusometry technique is a readout. This was done in the laboratory first with a camera, a microscope, and a computer to crunch the algorithms. With a very clever senior design team and a clever graduate student, we've ported that all now to a smartphone platform. This technology is now patented by Omniviz, which is our start-up company, and the graduate student is now the CEO, and this has been an incredibly rewarding experience. Later this year we expect to run a clinical trial on malaria detection in Rwanda, and the company Omniviz is doing trials also later this year on cholera detection in Bangladesh. This will be their third time back. It's been an incredibly rewarding experience to work with all of the talented people in my lab and all of my collaborators. These are my current lab, as you can imagine, doing all of this kind of disparate research, takes a large team, but it takes a lot of collaboration, and I am especially indebted to my collaborators, Sarah Calvi, C. Whirly, Jackie Linus, Krishnan Jayant, David Thompson, and Katherine Clayton, who's CEO of our start-up company. You'll notice the starred students here are all co-advised students. It's incredibly rewarding to take my skill set and combine that with someone else's skill set and do something together that we could never do independently. I'm overtime, so I will stop there and not talk about the teaching and the service, which is also an incredibly rewarding part of my job, and I thank you so much for your attention and take your questions. Questions? Comments? Well, I can comment on the extraordinary teaching and service. In a way, Tammy's one of those individuals, especially on the service front that just, as you can tell, naturally brings people together. Just as was mentioned before, collaborate with Tammy because the outcome on any front, be it an educational adventure or a research collaboration, will be positive, so I just wanted to make that comment.