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Irene Gabashvili
Senior Research Scientist
Computational BioScience Research

E-mail: First.Last@hp.com
Phone: (650) 236-4026
Fax: (650) 857-4146

Location:
Hewlett Packard Labs, MS 1169
1501 Page Mill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304

Bio Publications Talks
Interests Conference Papers
Professional activities

Biography:
Dr. Irene Gabashvili’s interest in biology started from studies of animal behavior and plant anatomy. Her first discoveries were on hungry hamsters, making holes in mom’s favorite furniture, if allowed to wander in the house and on herbaceous plants with roots strong enough to ruin dad’s favorite knife. Her freshman years in college were somewhat limited to the same species, but she promptly switched to torturing bacteria and viruses by melting them down in the laboratory of Professor George Mrevlishvili (then in Tbilisi, Georgia, the former Soviet Union). She soon realized that she preferred crunching numbers and interpreting experimental curves to smashing microbes and their proteins.
Both graduate theses of Irene Gabashvili were completed under supervision of Professor Alexander Grosberg, then a visiting professor at MIT, a well-known scientist from a famous Russian school of theoretical physics and statistical physics of macromolecules. Irene Gabashvili computationally modeled bacterial viruses and behavior of their genomes during the invasion into the victim and assembly of viral offsprings. She did not have to assume that a horse has a shape of a cube, only that a virus is a perfect sphere. This was reasonable enough to help in predicting and interpreting results of several biophysical experiments.

In the early to mid 90’s, Irene Gabashvili worked in the area that is now known as genetic epidemiology and computational biology. She served as the Head of a laboratory at the Center of Genetic Ecology, Georgia, until January 1995. The human genome project was still in its early stages, but human talents and abnormalities had already been recognized millennia ago as familial and the modes of inheritance were mined in the data. One of Dr. Gabashvili’s projects was on modeling inheritance of polycystic ovarian syndrome in women of Georgia. She was also computationally simulating the proliferation of cells and formation of chromosomal aberrations, particularly due to the altered DNA repair machinery. Several years later, in collaboration with Dr. Alexey Khodjakov, she simulated and interpreted experimentally visualized dynamics of chromosome movements in mitosis.

From January 1995, Dr. Irene Gabashvili was a visiting scientist with the University of Québec, Trois-Rivières, Canada, studying mechanism of plant photosynthesis in the laboratory of professor Mario Fragata. She was searching for markers in FTIR spectra of photosystem II pointing to specific structural transitions in the system.

Later, Dr. Gabashvili returned to studies of viruses, acquiring a wider range of molecular biological, biochemical and biophysical techniques in the laboratory of Professor Philip Serwer. In particular she discovered new mechanisms of gene expression regulation in bacteriophage T7, occurring on the level of translation and thus involving the ribosome. Irene Gabashvili started to thoroughly study this fascinating molecular machine producing proteins for each and every cell in 1997, in the laboratory of Joachim Frank, a pioneer of single-particle image reconstruction for cryo-electron microscopy, that showed the ribosome in action. She was involved in computational structural biology of the ribosome, reconstructing and interpreting the three-dimensional images by modeling, docking and fitting structures of protein and RNA components.

Next, Irene Gabashvili applied informatics approaches to study the ribosome and the mechanism of translation in the laboratory of Russ Altman, Stanford University, where she worked from 2001 to 2003. Her Stanford projects included mining of biochemical data for structure related information and knowledge engineering approaches to linking phenotypes and genotypes.

Irene Gabashvili joined the Computational Biosciences Research Program at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California on May 1, 2003. Some of her recent work at HP is described at the CBSR web page.

Memberships:
IEEE,
the Biophysical Society,
The International Society for Computational Biology,
the American Society for Cell Biology
the American Medical Iinformatics Association
the QSAR & Modelling Society.

Reviewer:
Journals
  • Bioinformatics
  • Journal of Biochemical and Biophysical Methods (JBBM)
  • Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (JBCB)
  • Journal of Molecular Biology (JMB)
  • Nature Structural and Molecular Biology (NSMB)

    Books

  • Annals of Biomedical Engineering (ABME)

    Conferences & Workshops

  • American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA 2002 Annual Symposium)
  • The Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PCB 2003, 2004)
  • IEEE Bioinformatics Conference, Life Sciences CSB conference (CSBC 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006)
  • ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, 2004

    Grants:

  • International Society for Technology and Education, 2005
  • National Science Foundation, 2005

    Co-chair:

  • Biophysical Society Meeting, 2004 (Protein-Nucleic Acid Interactions)
  • Biophysical Society Meeting, 2005 (Ion Channels)

    Current Research Interests:

    • Pattern recognition in biological data
    • Gene and protein regulatory networks
    • RNA layer of gene expression regulation
    • Signal-transduction circuitry of the auditory System
    • Multi-physics modeling of biological systems
    • Bionanotechnology
    • Molecular Signatures of Disease
    Other Web Pages:

    • People
    » Computational BioScience Research
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