BIOCHEMISTRY · MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
I'm a biochemistry student at Michigan State. What I want to do is the computational side of drug discovery, meaning designing and screening molecules on a computer before anything gets made, so the lab work after it is testing something specific instead of casting around.
Outside of class I run a two-node Proxmox cluster out of my dorm room. About a dozen services on it, including this page. Before college I spent three years running a small ant-keeping business.
01 What I'm after
A new drug takes something like a decade and billions of dollars to reach patients, and most of that gets spent on candidates that fail somewhere along the way. Modeling and screening up front is what narrows the field before the expensive part starts. That's where I want to work, and then carry it through — run the experiments on whatever survives the screen, collect the real data, and feed that back into the next round. Getting an antibiotic that beats a resistant strain, or a treatment for a disease that has none right now, depends on that loop running well.
What draws me is applying this more than building it. I want to be the researcher running the models and the screens against my own targets, using simulation and machine learning to reach further than bench work alone would. If that ends up meaning writing some of the tooling myself, fine — I'm after what it lets me find.
It isn't only small molecules, either. Engineered microbes and modified organisms, oncolytic viruses built to attack cancer, gene therapies for inherited disease: the same design and simulation approach runs underneath all of them.
Right now I'm looking for an undergraduate research position, ideally in a computational or modeling group: MSU's Institute for Quantitative Health Science & Engineering, CMSE, or the modeling people in Chemistry and BMB.
Most of what I know about pharmacology so far is self-taught. I read papers and work through drug mechanisms, structure–activity relationships and metabolism on my own time. None of it is lab research yet, and that's the gap I'm trying to close this year.
02 Things I've built
INFRASTRUCTURE
It started as one Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole and got out of hand from there. Right now it's a two-node Proxmox VE cluster with a Pi acting as the corosync qdevice, since two nodes can't hold a vote on their own.
Everything runs in LXC containers on a ZFS mirror. Pi-hole handles DNS and the router force-redirects port 53 to it. That DNAT rule needs a matching SNAT rule or the whole LAN goes down, which I found out the hard way. Jellyfin transcodes on a passed-through Intel iGPU. For remote access I use a Tailscale subnet router instead of forwarding ports, and only two things are actually public through a Cloudflare Tunnel: the media server and this site.
The router is a Netgear Orbi I flashed with OpenWrt. It sits behind one dorm wall port so the school only has to register one MAC address instead of nine.
BUSINESS
I started collecting and watching ants as a kid, and for about three years I ran it as a small business selling colonies and equipment. I still keep four: Myrmecocystus placodops, which are honeypots and store liquid food inside living workers, Acanthomyrmex glabfemoralis, Polyrhachis dives, and a founding Camponotus sansabeanus queen.
The build I'm working on now is a paludarium for the Polyrhachis in a 20-gallon tank. LECA base, a polycarbonate divider holding back the water section, hang-on-back filter, and a water moat instead of a barrier fluid. In a sealed enclosure the humidity, the temperature and the mold are all tied to each other, so most of the work is getting those to sit in balance on their own.
About three years ago I also started a Discord server for ant trading. It's grown to around 170 members and is the largest US-based one I'm aware of. I'm hands off with it now — moderators and admins run it day to day, which is what I was aiming for.
03 Toolbox
For clarity: I'm a systems and configuration person rather than a trained software engineer, and I lean on AI tooling for code I couldn't write unaided and for getting into unfamiliar literature quickly.
04 Before this
Two summers at the park pool and year-round shifts at the club, since that one is indoors. Red Cross certified in CPR, First Aid and AED. Twenty hour weeks over the summer. Most of the job is watching closely enough that nothing happens in the first place.
Ran drop-in sessions: moving photos off phones, installing apps, whatever people came in with. I also drove around dropping off pamphlets at local businesses. The hard part of that job isn't the technical side, it's explaining something to somebody who has no reason to already know it.
Produce, hot food bar and stocking shelves, plus enough counter and floor time to get comfortable handling customers. Dishwasher at a local restaurant before that.
Patrol Leader, Quartermaster, Grubmaster. Led outings and classes for around fifteen people, cooked for about thirty, kept track of troop supplies. First Class rank, 15 merit badges including First Aid and Search & Rescue, and a nomination to the Order of the Arrow.
2nd grade through 9th. Assistant captain, right wing and defense. First place in the 2021 state competition.
Freshman, JV and varsity. Nose guard and right tackle. Varsity letter.
05 Contact
If we talked at a career fair, mention what we talked about and I'll know who you are.