After spending his summer in Pittsburgh with TECBio in 2021, Behrgen Smith has been building off of his experience, skills, and knowledge in computational biology to great success. He has continued his work in Dr. Ivet Bahar’s lab since their initial REU experience, helping them with their industrial collaboration following the TECBio program. There, he was subsequently recruited by Congruence Therapeutics for an internship. He’ll be joining their team full time this June as a Data Scientist developing machine learning models for predicting pharmacological properties of potential therapeutics.

Behrgen calls TECBio instrumental in starting his career. He says, “During the REU, I gained a mastery of several computational tools that were key to my future success. Furthermore, I was afforded an environment where I could explore new topics and techniques, and, really appreciate and understand how they all worked together. Being able to study under and learn from an amazing scientist like Dr. Bahar was also life changing. Under the mentorship from her and her lab members, I developed a solid background in their techniques and the models they developed for protein dynamics.”

Behrgen hasn’t just used what he learned in TECBio to advance his own career- he’s been sharing his knowledge and techniques at his home institution, Milwaukee School of Engineering. There, he leads a club which teaches the techniques he learned at TECBio and introduces undergraduates to research in a hands on manner. The name of the club is CREST: Connecting Researchers Educators and STudents. It teaches the basics of computer aided drug design, how to read research papers, docking simulations and the basics of how the Elastic Network Model of protein structure to teach protein dynamics. They sent two teams to a conference in Philadelphia in 2022 and presented this year in Seattle.

Says Behrgen, “Protein dynamics is a topic that is mentioned but rarely covered at the undergraduate level, so it’s been a unique opportunity for those who have participated. The club existed before TECBio, but it lost funding right before I started the REU. I reformed the club into what I learned from TECBio and started teaching what I learned to others. I am proud to say that several members have cited CREST as a primary reason for their success, and has directly contributed to club members being accepted into other REU’s and internship programs (Maryland Seagrant Environmental Engineering REU and D.E. Shaw Research).”

Please join us in congratulating Behrgen on his impressive successes so far and wishing him the best of luck in the future!