Should we start having Science AMA's? @lemouth and I have talked about doing this for quite a long time now. But we have never pulled the trigger. We actually had hoped to recruit more people to help with the @steemstem project and could use that to help attract outside scientists to maybe do an AMA as well ( the project account could ensure their post gets voted on for a good reward ). However all of this takes manpower and a non-frightening science trending page (people get scared off when they see the weird stuff that floats here at times). So it ends up being quite challenging.

As for my research, I currently am employed by a small pharmaceutical company as a research scientist where I work on a rare genetic disease (can't disclose which). One of the unfortunate side effects with working for pharma is all of the NDA's I have signed and the fact that I can't really discuss all that much about what I am doing. In the past my research focused on the kinetic and biophysical characterization of DNA replication enzymes/complexes. I did a lot of really fast timescale (using things like stopped flow fluorescence spectroscopy, or rapid quench instrumentation) experimentation looking into the actual kinetic mechanism that some of these enzymes employ. One would think that considering all of the time already spent studying these that they would be pretty well figured out... but they are surprisingly still not really polished out. Many aspects of their mechanisms are not nailed down with a good degree of certainty. This is where my publications attempted to come in ( for a few enzymes from a few specific model systems at least!). They still get citations so I guess I did some okay work!