Isabela Camacho

Hello! I'm Isabela Camacho, a junior Physics major at Santa Clara University with minors in Mathematics and Computer Science & Engineering. I'm deeply engaged in research projects ranging from neuropeptide modeling to biophysics, and I have a passion for coding.
In the summer of 2025, I worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in David Klindt's Lab, studying when linear probes fail and how sparse autoencoders and dictionary learning can reveal more interpretable latent structure. During the summer of 2024, I worked in Dr. David J. Anderson's lab at Caltech under my mentor Aditya Nair centered on neuropeptide release modeling. Our goal was to more accurately model the biophysical mechanisms that give rise to line attractor networks in the ventrolateral subregion of the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMHvL). My previous work experience in the summer of 2023 was in analyzing the Shannon entropy of the green flourescent protein (GFP) to predict its conserved residues when folding under my mentor Dr. Shyam Gajavelli at the University of Florida. As of October 2024, I have joined Prof. Michelle McCulley's lab at SCU to continue pursuing my protein folding research. In the McCulley labe, I use molecular dynamics to analyze protein–DNA chimeras and connect simulation results to protein folding and stability.
In the future, I aim to pursue graduate studies in Nueroscience or Biophysics. I am passionate about using my computational background to model biological systems with the hope of creating applicable medical solutions.