Mikaela Elder is a undergraudate student in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Colorado State University. She has worked in a genetics lab on a project investigating the effects of mutation in proteins linked to neurodegenerative diseases and a project investigating the atypical structural tendencies among low-complexity domains in the Protein Data Bank proteome. Her goals are to learn how to mathematically model biological systems in an effort to better understand the mechanisms of biochemical processes.