Welcome to new faculty
Daniel Babcock, Ph.D. Assistant Professor |
Daniel Babcock, Ph.D.
The department welcomed Assistant Professor Daniel Babcock as its newest tenure track faculty member in 2016. Babcock earned his bachelor of arts degree in neuroscience from the University of Delaware and his Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston/MD Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. Babcock did his post-doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin- Madison.
In the classroom, Dr. Babcock will be teaching Physiology along with some neuroscience-related courses involving neurodegenerative diseases.
The Babcock Lab is interested in understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the earliest hallmarks of neurodegenerative diseases. These processes include the destruction of synapses and the cell-to-cell transmission of protein aggregates throughout the brain. Very little is known about how these processes occur and how they relate to later stages of disease progression. The Babcock Lab is also attempting to discover why certain populations of neurons are involved in a particular disease. For example: Why are Dopaminergic neurons especially vulnerable in Parkinson’s Disease? The lab uses the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, to focus its research on addressing these issues.
Dr. Babcock is an active peer reviewer for the Journal of Neurogenetics as well as Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) – Molecular Basis of Disease.
Daniel is married to his wife, Nichole, and they have an eight-year-old son, Phillip.
Wonpil Im, Ph.D. Professor |
Wonpil Im, Ph.D.
The department of biological sciences welcomes Wonpil Im, Ph.D. who was hired this past summer as the Presidential Endowed Chair in Health – Science and Engineering. Dr. Im is a professor in the department and a member of the bioengineering program.
Wonpil received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Hanyang University in Seoul. He then earned his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Cornell University. He did his post-doctoral research at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. In 2005, Dr. Im was hired as an assistant professor in the Center for Computational Biology and Department of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. In 2011, he was promoted to associate professor and then professor in 2015.
Dr. Im recently was awarded the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation and was named a KIAS Scholar from the Korea Institute for Advanced Study. Prior to Lehigh, he was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2007), ACS HP Outstanding Junior Faculty Award (2011), J. Michael Young Undergrad Advisor Award (2011), Meredith Docking Scholar (2013), and University Scholarly Achievement Award (2015).
Research in the Im Lab is focused on the applications of theoretical/computational methods to chemical and physical problems in biology and materials science. Specific research interests are:
• Protein/peptide interactions with/in biological membranes
• Transmembrane-induced signaling and regulation
• NMR structure calculation & refinement
• Modeling and simulation of glycoconjugates
• Bacterial outer membranes and interactions with proteins
• Protein-ligand and protein-protein interactions
In addition, Dr. Im’s research group is involved in developing the biomolecular simulation program CHARMM and its user interface CHARMM-GUI as well as ST-analyzer, a general graphical user interface toolset for simulation trajectory analysis. In the last five years, he published a total of 62 papers (47 papers as the senior author, including 7 papers with undergraduates) and his work has garnered a total of 6,948 citations (Google Scholar). Dr. Im has a long history of research support from the Human Frontier Science Program, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Im is married to his wife, Hyesook Cho, and they have two children - Jaeyoung and Nayoung.
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