Education

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

Research Overview

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.