Josh Phythian


BA in Computer Science
College of Integrative Sciences
@ Wesleyan University
BA in Computer Science
Integrative Sciences
@ Wesleyan University

Golden Spiral

RESEARCH FELLOW @ THAYER LAB

The Thayer lab aims to restore the cancer-fighting protein p53 to its normal function after mutation, since mutated p53 is involved in over 50% of cancers. Experimental methods can’t provide the atomic detail needed, so our lab uses High Performance Computing and Molecular Dynamics Simulations to fill the gap.

UNDERGRADUATE THESIS

I was awarded High Honors in the College of Integrative Sciences and Honors in Computer Science for my undergraduate thesis, "Sector Analysis of the p53 Tumor Suppressor Protein".

Here is a pdf of my thesis: link

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH

SKILLS: LINUX/UNIX, Python, Bash

I worked in optimization where I would use:

in order to create and speedup drug design pipelines on Wesleyan's High Performance Computing Cluster

I taught a tea forum with a friend of mine Spring 2025 and wanted to make a website to present the scheduling information.
I wanted to try some more web design stuff and I have a ranking of most monster zero flavors, so I made this. First I tried webscraping the monster page to get images, but they had an anti scraping protocol, so I just tediously downloaded them all. Next I used PIL to pick the font and can color for each can, and add that to a dictionary with my ranking for the flavor. Then I used the dictionary to create the images seen in the background. Then I used scroll trigger to implement some animations.
I wanted to explore some basic web design, webscraping and put my rankings for each celsius flavor somewhere. After a lot of selenium and bs4 testing, I could not get past the captchas to get images for all the celsius, so I had to download them all manually, hence the uneven sizing across the images.
Explore my work on analyzing sectors and running models. To use this: input a correlation matrix from applying cpptraj on an MD output and the corresponding pdb file. I used flask to just make a simple webpage and connect it to my python code for sector identification.
Germanic Latin Game
This link is currently down. I have to make a new pythonanywhere account to start running it. A game where you guess if a word has germanic or latin roots. A friend was playing this game using wikipedia, and I thought, that wouldn't be too hard to automate. I wanted to use the wikipedia API and request a random term each time, but it was just kinda easier to scrape wikipedia, then make a table using the scraped data, and randomly pick a term from that table. I may add another gamemode soon.
This is an escape room about a musician who has to get his life back together and write some music . It was my first time using git and unity together. Also it is not designed to be played on the web so it is a little glitchy.