She is the author of Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills (O'Reilly and Associates, 2001) and currently teaches bioinformatics methods to Biology and Biochemistry undergraduates. Cynthia got her Ph.D. in Biophysics and Computational Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has been a computational biologist since before computational biology was cool. In past research, she's studied macromolecular surface properties and chased the Holy Grail of protein structure prediction. Her current research projects range from the large scale to the small, including pattern recognition in multiple genome data sets, and identification and modeling of genes involved in the Type II Diabetes syndrome.