My name is Andrea Rocha and I am a Ph.D student at the University of South Florida in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering.  Although I am working towards my degree in Engineering Science, I hope to integrate  my biology, ocean science, and environmental sciences background to improve bioremediation efforts and technologies.

 I joined the RAMS program to gain work experience in at a National Laboratory and the field of computational biology and conduct research in my field of interest.

 This summer, I have the pleasure of working on my doctoral studies as a participant in the Research Alliance in Math and Science (RAMS) program in Oak Ridge, TN .  As part of my internship, I am working in the Computational Sciences and Mathematics Division under the direction of Dr. Nagiza Samatova and Dr. Tatiana Karpinets.  As part of my project this summer, I will reconstruct the metabolic pathways of multiple strains of Shewanella. Under the direction of my research mentors at ORNL and my major advisor, Dr. Peter Stroot, at the University of South Florida, I will use the results of my summer project to evaluate the specific growth rates of selected Shewanella strains.