Dr. Betancourt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics. He has a Ms. in Physics and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from University of California, San Diego. He has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Maryland College Park and at SUNY Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics. Dr. Betancourt's current research interest/goal involves the theoretical development of protein coarse-grained models, including the systematic development of effective free energies that can be used for simulating their structure and long time-scale dynamics, and the theory of protein sequence design.