Nathan Gravel

Hey, my name is Nathan Gravel. I grew up in Naperville Illinois. I attended Iowa State and have undergraduate degrees in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and also in Genetics. I always had an affinity for computers but my passion lies in biology. On top of that, there are some many questions in biology that could be more efficiently solved with the aid of computers. When applying my passions, my main goal is to incorporate computer science into every biology lab. My background has taught me to enjoy working with scientists that view the world differently. The PREP program gave me the opportunity to work with scientists of differing  backgrounds and diverse thinkers. I feel like some problems in science need “outside of the box thinking” to solve. UGA PREP also gave me time to think about my career path. Coming into this program I wasn’t aware if academia was right for me. I grew up with some learning disabilities. Because of this, school was always a giant hurdle for me and I never really got the best grades. So when I say that I was hesitant to dive head first into upper level education, I mean it. PREP really did give me a lot of help in making me feel confident in knowing what I was getting into. I now have a great understanding of the inner workings of graduate school that I was not taught during my time as an undergrad.

My previous work has been in entomology and creating novel pipelines with transcriptomics data. We used statistical modeling to assemble transcriptomes in a high throughput manner. This was mostly done in a dry lab and really got me interested with research in bioinformatics. The main goal of the lab was to apply statistics in a biology setting.

I also work in a plant pathology lab that specializes in post translational modification with mass spectrometry. This was where I spent some time in a wet lab environment. The goal of the lab was to apply arabidopsis biochemical pathway to maize. This is where I got to work on my own projects and I enjoyed the freedom that came with working in a research lab.

I currently work in Dr. Kannan’s lab at UGA. His lab specializes in using computational tools to explore kinases across species. I personally create evolutionary tools to aid in finding relationships among different kinases throughout the tree of life. We utilize computational tools ranging from machine learning to molecular dynamics to achieve our goals. This lab really gives me the opportunity to work with all types of scientists. I really like the environment in lab and at UGA and I feel like it gives me everything I need to thrive.