Valafar

Dr. Valafar's research activities fall into two broad categories of research: Computational Medicine and Computational Biology. The computational medicine tier of his research is focused on development of computational modeling of human response to different medical treatments or methods of rehabilitation. Dr. Valafar's group has demonstrated a success in relation to administration of Hydroxyurea for alleviation of symptoms associated with Sickle Cell Anemia. The second tier of his research focuses on the problem of protein folding. The general community of researchers focus on two disjoint and orthogonal approaches to protein structure determination: purely experimental and purely computational approaches. Each of these two approaches possess advantages and disadvantages that results in their continued research and developments and hinders their practical utility. Dr. Valafar's current research (funded by NIH and NSF) is focused on exploration of hybrid approaches that combines minimum experimental data with novel computational approaches. This hybrid approach has been shown to combine the advantages of each contributing components while mitigating their detriments.

Education

• Ph. D., Purdue University - West Lafayette (1995)
• M. S., Purdue University - West Lafayette (1990)
• B. S., Michigan Technological University - Houghton (1988)

Selected Publications

• Park SH, Son WS, Mukhopadhyay R, Valafar H, Opella SJ., Phage-induced alignment of membrane proteins enables the measurement and structural analysis of residual dipolar couplings with dipolar waves and lambda-maps. J Am Chem Soc. 2009 Oct 14;131(40):14140-1. PMID: 19761238 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] [www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]
• Mukhopadhyay R, Miao X, Shealy P, Valafar H, Efficient and accurate estimation of relative order tensors from ?-maps, J Magn Reson. Volume 198, Issue 2, June 2009, Pages 236-247
• Miao X, Mukhopadhyay R, Valafar H, Estimation of relative order tensors, and reconstruction of vectors in space using unassigned RDC data and its application, J Magn Reson. 2008 Oct;194(2):202-11
• Bansal S, Miao X, Adams MW, Prestegard JH, Valafar H, Rapid classification of protein structure models using unassigned backbone RDCs and probability density profile analysis (PDPA). J Magn Reson. 2008 Feb 12
• Bryson M, Tian F, Prestegard JH, Valafar H, REDCRAFT: A tool for simultaneous characterization of protein backbone structure and motion from RDC data. J Magn Reson. 2008 Apr;191(2):322-34