Maurício Menegatti Rigo awarded grant to work at Kavraki Lab, USA
Photo: Personal archive
Maurício Menegatti Rigo, a student in the Graduate Program in Pediatrics and Child Health (PPGPSC), was awarded with a grant from Rice University, USA, where he did his research from Oct 7 – 18. The opportunity marks the collaboration between the PUCRS’ Clinical and Experimental Immunology Laboratory, coordinated by Dr Ana Paula Duarte de Souza, and the Kavraki Lab, coordinated by Dr Lydia Kavraki, at the US institution.
PUCRS and Rice University have been partners in the area of Computational Biology: it focuses on the use of computer power to solve biological problems. This area is also known as bioinformatics.
The activities in his schedule that were developed in the United States, besides lectures and meetings with researchers at Rice, include a short course on bioinformatics tools at the First International Symposium on Mathematical and Computational Oncology in Nevada, and the presentation of a paper at 29th Annual Keck Annual Research Conference, Texas.
After his visit, the partnership will continue, as researchers are expected to develop and improve computational biology tools. “More specifically, we are working on ways to predict the mode of peptide-binding, small amino acid sequences, in Class I and II Main Histocompatibility Complex (MHC-I and MHC-II) molecules”, he adds.
