I was a fourth year student of Department of Physics and Mechanics, Technical State University, St. Petersburg at the time I was looking for a lab for my future career. My classmate Masha Sherimet told me about the very successful lab at the Nuclear Physics Institute. We came for an interview and were very surprised with the way Dr. Schwartz conducted the interview. He was very friendly, personable, and funny, but what I liked most was the atmosphere in the lab which was staffed mainly by women and provided a very friendly and supportive environment. I was very proud to have passed the interview and, I spent some of the best years of my career in the lab, where I completed both my Masters and PhD Theses. During my years there, I was involved in many projects and gained expertise in identification and evaluation of genetic risk factors in different genetics diseases. I also had the opportunity to develop an SNP database of a pool of genes related to cardiovascular diseases. However, I gained not only a lot of knowledge from my time there, but many strong friendships that continue well after my time at the facility.
I left the lab in 2006 and was working in National Institute on Aging, NIH where I studied the role of adenylate cyclases in phosphorylation of sinoatrial node proteins and control of spontaneous beating and the Ets2 transcription factor in heart and the role of the factor in aging, cellular senescence and longevity. Recently I moved out of lab work to focus on data analyses. I am working at the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Department, Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, San-Diego. My research focus is protein conformation analysis, phylogenetic analysis in the aspect of biological relevance and evolution as well as genome content analysis, and the analysis of microarray data. Moreover, I am living in the best city in the U.S. according to Dr. Schwartz. J
Selected publications:
1. A. Sheydina*, M. Volkova*, L Jiang, O. Juhasz, J. Zhang, H.J. Tae, MG. Perino, M. Wang, Y. Zhu, EG. Lakatta and Kenneth R. Boheler. Linkage of Cardiac Genes and ETS2 with Lifespan Variability in Rodents. Aging Cell, submitted for publication.* equally contributed authors. 2012, Aging Cell in press.
2. AYounes*, A.E. Lyashkov*, D. Graham*, A. Sheydina*, M. Volkova*, M. Mitsak, T. Vinogradova, Y. Lukyanenko, Y. Li, A. M. Ruknudin, K.R. Boheler, J.van Eyk, E.G. Lakatta. Ca2+-stimulated Basal Adenylyl Cyclase Activity Localization in Membrane Lipid Microdomains of Cardiac Sinoatrial Nodal Pacemaker Cells, 2008, J Biol Chem. 23;283(21):14461-8.* equally contributed authors
3. Sheydina A.M., Pchelina S.N., Rodigina T.I., Sirotkina O.V., Taraskina А.E. Khodzaynts N.I., Schwarzman A.L., E.I. Schwartz. Genetics risk factors of ischemic stroke. 2006, Medical Genetics, vol.2. Russian
4. Sheydina A.M., Sirotkina O.V., Pchelina, S.N., Vavilova T.V., Papayan K.A., Papayan L.P., E.I. Schwartz. Genetics risk factors development of thrombosis in young age. 2005, Questions of modern pediatry, vol. 4(2): 42-46. Russian.