People: Astrobiology Graduate Students

Aaron Goldman
Microbiology

I received my undergraduate degree in Biology from Swarthmore College in 2003. For three years following graduation, I taught high school Biology, Physics, and Math at the Princeton Science Academy. In the fall of last year, I joined both the Microbiology department and Astrobiology program at the University of Washington as a graduate student.

I arrived here an experimental microbiologist, but have recently converted to computational biology. My principal interests include the evolution of protein function, mechanisms of evolution at the molecular level, and the origin of the information transduction system found in extant biology.

I work in a group (Ram Samudrala, PI) that specializes in protein structure/function prediction. Currently, I am working on a suite of programs that will measure functional distance between pairs of homologous proteins at both the global and local levels.

When I'm not pursuing science, I enjoy playing music, cooking, and watching professional football.