I was awarded the Postdoctoral Fellow Excellence in Service Award at UMB. It was a great honor to be recognized by the University for all the work I do with outreach to local students. I love interacting with students of all ages, including young kids at an annual halloween event, middle-school kids with a mix of youthful energy and a growing sense of responsibility, and high-schoolers who can imagine trying to address “wicked” problems in society. Read more
I volunteered at the UMB RAMP program’s May Lunch & Learn activity, where a UMB researcher meets with a small group of high school students to discuss their research, career development and trajectory, and then give a demonstration with a hands-on activity. The students played a short game of Monte Carlo pi estimation in person, then we wrote some python code to do the same thing. While not directly related to molecular simulation, it relates a few key ideas, like how seemingly “random” events can converge on a stable value, or how useful computers can be to iterate over a simple, repeatable arithmetic task. Read more
My paper on hydrophobic dewetting, published with Jianhan and Zhiguang, was selected as one of twenty articles in the Best of Biophysical Journal 2023! This is a big honor, and feels immensely gratifying! This was essentially my first attempt to guide the direction of a research project more directly, although Jianhan of course provided many mission-critical suggestions and corrections at every phase of the project. The honor came as a surprise since none of us knew about the honor until seeing the issue in print after the BPS Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. Check it out! Read more
I gave my final PhD dissertation defense on Monday, June 5th 2023. This was a very special day, and week, to reflect on the work I’ve done and the progress I’ve made as a scientist, and to share that progress with my family, friends, and the academic community here in Amherst. It’s been a wonderful and challenging expeirence. Read more
I have accepted a position at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, in Alex MacKerell’s lab in the School of Pharmacy. In addition, I have been awarded funding through the Cancer Biology T-32 training grant. I will utilize simulation techniques devleoped by Alex’s group to identify drug-like small molecules for targeting ion channels (BK in particular) in cancer cells. 
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My first class, a first-year seminar called “Order and Chaos, Reconciling atomic randomness and the human world” was a big success. Some of the final projects students designed, carried out and presented:
For my recent presentation at the UMass Chemistry ResearchFest, I was awarded the second-place award, a great honor and a generous monetary prize. I was among 4 student speakers selected for the highly-competitive presentations each year. One senior student per lab can be nominated. I was following in the tradition of the great Xiaorong Liu, who spoke at my first ResearchFest in 2018. Read more
The UMass College of Natural Sciences offers a First-year seminar to CNS-declared majors under the broad umbrella “Think like a Scientist”. Graduate students interested in a teaching career are encouraged to apply. Each FYS is unqiue to the person teaching it, which gave me the opportunity to build a (mini) cirriculum and practice some skills I learned abstractly by taking CIRTL online training courses. Read more
This online course (through the edX platform and CIRTL) introduced me to the kinds of challenges facing an ‘expert’ in a field who is trying to reach a collection of students with various skills, previous knowledge, and emotions. In fact, the growth-mindset and iterative, active learning priciples I hope to implement are the same I need to use to learn how to teach. 
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This online course (through the edX platform) used embodied case study videos and self-reflection prompts to train grad students, postdocs and current faculty to approach education through personal and inclusive strategies backed by the latest educational reserach. 
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Erik and Zoe got married in Eagle, ID. We met at the College of Idaho in Caldwell, ID. 
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The Chemistry Biology Interface (CBI) is a competitive NIH-funded fellowship designed “to train students with diverse scientific backgrounds for productive research at the interface between chemistry and biology” at UMass.” 
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My colleague Xiping Gong and I learned that one can host a free website at username.github.io using a special repo with that name. He then found the awesome template academicpages.github.io, which I immediately forked and started using. Since then, many of my colleagues have followed suit: Read more
