Short Bio:

Anna Tarakanova joined the University of Connecticut in 2018 as Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Her research focuses on advancing molecular and multiscale modeling methods to study the structure, function and mechanics of biological and bioinspired materials driving the development of new functional materials for medical and engineering applications. Additionally, she investigates new characterization approaches for highly disordered molecules, their associated functions and implications for health and disease. Her work aims to expose disease mechanisms from a fundamental scale into structural and functional hierarchies associated with complex biological systems. She received her B.S. in Applied and Engineering Physics from Cornell University (2011), and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2015 and 2017, respectively), followed by a one-year appointment as a postdoctoral scholar also at MIT.

Keywords: molecular modeling and simulation, multiscale modeling, biological materials, protein folding, disordered proteins, biomaterials, biomechanics, disease modeling, molecular structure characterization