Dr. Summa joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Orleans as an Assistant Professor in August of 2007. Dr. Summa received a B.S. in Biochemistry and a B.A. in Russian from the Pennsylvania State University and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Summa was a three-year NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Bioinformatics at Stanford University School of Medicine before joining the department.

The fields of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology depend heavily on the use of computational tools to understand fundamental problems in Biology and Biochemistry. Dr. Summa's research focuses on protein structure/function relationships, protein structure prediction, and protein design and engineering. These research areas lie at the interface between biochemistry, chemistry, physics, computer science, bioinformatics, computational biology, molecular biology, and bioengineering.

As a graduate student, focusing on protein design and its computational aspects, Dr. Summa worked on the design, analysis, and characterization of di-metal binding proteins, implemented a suite of computer programs for computational protein design, and designed and produced a water-soluble variant of the integral membrane protein phospholamban. He also designed and implemented a potential function that has shown promise in the field of ab initio protein structure prediction.

At Stanford, Dr. Summa participated in CASP5 as an ab initio protein structure predictor and has been working on the derivation, testing, and optimization of potential functions for use in ab initio protein structure prediction and in near-native protein model refinement. He participated in the CASP7 refinement experiment using potentials he developed at Stanford, and is also working on design of symmetric self-assembling protein systems, continuing a line of research he began in graduate school.