Dan Parente -- The Main Page

Website links:
Curriculum Vitae - Academic Summary - Schedule - Archives: Programs and Papers - Virus and Spyware Utilities - Links

On this page:
About Me - Recent News - Schedules - Academics - Tutoring - Contact Information

About Me

Dan ParenteMy name is Dan Parente and I am a 4th year undergraduate in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  I began my coursework here in fall of 2004.  I am studying Engineering Physics and Electrical Engineering as my major fields. I am principally interested in biophysics and artificially intelligence within those areas.   I am significantly interested in protein biophysics and had a chance to study them using computational means at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in the summer of 2007.  Also, I am working with the Biomolecular Materials Science and Biophysics Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studying membrane biophysics.  In addition to my major coursework, I'm also pursuing minors in mathematics and chemistry.

My home city is that of Overland Park, Kansas, which is a fairly large suburban community in the middle of the United States.  There I lived with my family including my parents Ernie and Linda, an analytical chemist and a biologist, and my sisters, Laura and Karen.   Laura is now a second year Elementary Education student at Kansas State University. Karen is a senior attending, as I once did, Blue Valley Northwest High School.  Jenny Buseman, my girlfriend of many years, is also a student at Kansas State.  She is a 4rd year undergraduate in Microbiology.

One of my major hobbies is writing computer programs.  I write in a variety of languages including C#, Java, x86 Assembly, C++, Matlab, Visual Basic and some others.   In particular, I like developing artificially intelligent programs to play games or solve puzzles (e.g. Connect four or Sudoku), but I also develop other applications to make my life easier, learn a new skill or simply try something new.

Recent News

1 July 2007

I have posted a set of command line utilities under the GNU General Public License.  The utilities include one that opens a folder in the current working directory, one that copies the current working directory to the clipboard and one that horizontally concatenates files together.  I hope you find them useful!

6 June 2007

I am working with Nick Grishin's group at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center for the summer.  This follows after a semester (Spring 2007) in which I took the following courses:

Additionally, I have begun working with Dr. Vernita Gordon in the Biomolecular Materials Science and Biophysics group under Dr. Gerald Wong during Spring 2007.  I am studying cell penetrating peptides and will resume my research project in Fall 2007.

30 September 2006

I'm working with a group of 5 other students in my Artificial Intelligence class on a set of collaborative projects.  Our AI Project Team's Website has gone live and is visible.  It currently contains a program in Matlab that we wrote that detects the edges between lanes in an image of roads.  There are some videos included also.  I encourages you to check them out.

August 2006

I have returned to UIUC for my 3rd year in physics and electrical engineering after my summer internship with Microsoft wherein I did performance testing for the Windows SharePoint Services team as a Software Design Engineering in Test (SDET).  I am now enrolled in:

See the table below for hyperlinks and a color coded chart.

More news is available in the News Archive.

Schedule

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is currently in summer session and I am not taking any classes during the summer term.  I will resume my studies at the conclusion of the summer in Fall 2007 and begin my 4th year of undergraduate study.   I will make that schedule available as soon as it stabilizes.

Academics

I have endeavored to make available a full list of my academic history.  In particular several options of viewing this are available:

I have also made available several papers that I have written either for various classes or independently.  These are available at from the papers and essays archive.

Tutoring

I provide free tutoring for one hour a week through the UIUC Chapter of Tau Beta Pi, an Engineering Honor Society which I am joining.  Topics include mathematics through advanced calculus, physics through intermediate classical and quantum mechanics as well as intermediate electrodynamics, electrical and computer engineering topics and selected topics in chemistry.

Additionally I am possibly available for peer tutoring at a reasonable cost.  I have had experience teaching in the following areas:

Additionally, I am prepared to offer tutoring in, but have not previously instructed students in, the following areas:

Contact Information

You can obtain my contact information at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign phonebook by clicking on this link.  Additionally, please feel free to access my Facebook profile if you are registered with the system.

I've chosen to force the directory lookup rather than allow direct access to my contact information from this page to protect myself from the evil, web-roving spam-bots (of doom) which will surely capture my information if I publish it here.