Craig J. Benham

Dr. Benham’s research group develops statistical mechanical methods to computationally analyze structural transitions in stressed DNA molecules. These methods have been used to analyze a wide variety of genomic DNA sequences, including the complete genomes of Escherichia coli, Saccharomyces cerevisciae, and Homo sapiens. The group has shown that the susceptibility to stress-induced destabilization is closely associated with several types of DNA regulatory regions. This approach is providing unprecedented new insights into the precise mechanisms behind numerous biologically-important events.