Associate Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry
Dr. Maricel Kann is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland,Baltimore County. She received a B. Sc. degree in Chemistry and a graduate degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the Universidad de la Republica in Montevideo (Uruguay), where she was a research assistant in the Quantum Chemistry Department. In 2001, she obtained a doctoral degree from the University of Michigan in Chemistry. Her thesis work under the guidance of Dr. Richard A. Goldstein focused on the theory, statistics and methods for protein sequence alignment. After completing her Ph.D., Dr. Kann joined the Structure group at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NIH) as a postdoctoral fellow. In August 2007, she joined the Department of Biological Sciences at UMBC as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Kann’s research focuses on computational approaches to annotate the human genome with the goal of revealing the molecular underpinning of human diseases. One of the crucial steps after sequencing the genome is to classify and assign function to gene-encoded proteins. Dr. Kann’s work addresses these challenges studying new computational methodologies to align, classify and predict interactions of proteins as well as to identify the role of certain mutations in the disease mechanisms. Dr. Kann is one of the leading experts in the area of translational Bioinformatics, she is the editor of the textbook “Translational Bioinformatics and has chaired several international conference sessions at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB), the Intelligent Systems and Molecular Biology (ISMB) and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Summit in Bioinformatics. She is a member of AMIA, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Society of Computational Biology. Dr. Kann is part of the editorial boards of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and the International Journal of Computational Models and Algorithms in Medicine and she is an advisory board member of the PubMedCentral National Committee.