Advisers and Mentors

Prof. CK Prahalad was an inspiration for many at the Ross school of . I had the priviledge of being initiated into the BOP field by Prof. Prahalad. We are interested in continuiung his legacy and this work is a small effort to pay our intellectual debt to him.

Prof. Prahalad transitioned from this world in 2010. We continue to be inspired by his bold vision of a world in which business is a force for good.

Prof. Raj Reddy is the Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

He is the first Asian to have won the prestigious Alan Turing award.

Dr. Reddy advises us on the vision and strategies in solving challenging problems using AI.

Willow graduated from the Evergreen State College with degrees in Chemistry and Environmental studies. As an undergraduate in Dr. Anitra Ingalls’s lab at the University of Washington, he studied how B vitamins mediate microbial interactions and diversity in the open ocean. For graduate school, Willow did his Ph.D. in Dr. Daniel Schmidt’s lab at the University of Minnesota, where he developed massively parallel sequencing-based methods to study and engineer proteins. Using mutational and insertional scanning methods, Willow found these methods can be useful for identifying regions of a protein involved in functionally meaningful conformational changes, developed mechanistic models for how to assemble protein domains to create useful multi-domain protein tools, and studied the evolution of ion channel regulation.

As an HHMI Hanna Gray and QBI Fellow, Willow is inventing high-throughput sequencing-based biophysics and biochemistry methods for understanding how a genetic, chemical, or physical perturbations alters the trafficking or functional state of receptors. The long-term goal of this work is to build mechanistic holistic models of how receptors break in disease and work in normal physiology