Natarajan Kannan is Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and the Institute of Bioinformatics in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Georgia. His inter-disciplinary research group uses concepts and techniques from diverse disciplines including biophysics, biochemistry, and bioinformatics to understand the function and evolution of large gene families such as protein kinases. Prof. Kannan and his group are applying a combination of computational and experimental approaches to understand how natural sequence variation contributes to functional variation in protein kinases, and how non-natural variation contributes to disease.