Brigita Urbanc after completing her Ph.D. research on ferroelectric liquid crystals at Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and joined the Center for Polymer Studies in Physics Department at Boston University, where she began applying statistical physics methods and simulation techniques to Alzheimer's disease research. She significantly contributed to a development of a cellular automaton model of senile plaque growth that elucidated the origins of the porous structure of plaques which lead to prediction of senile plaque clearance. In 2008, she joined the Physics Department at Drexel University, where she is currently pursuing computational and experimental studies of folding and assembly of amyloid beta-protein and other intrinsically disordered proteins, such as alpha synuclein and tau protein. She adapted the discrete molecular dynamics method combined with a four-bead and united-atom protein models to study folding and early assembly of intrinsically disordered proteins and the effect of peptide toxicity inhibitors on protein assembly.
Biography Updated on 4 September 2011