Lathrop has a joint faculty appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Dr. Lathrop's research for the last 15 years has involved applying intelligent systems and advanced computation to problems in molecular biology. He has broad interests in computational molecular biology, including current research interests in protein structure prediction from sequence, protein-DNA interactions and genetic regulation, rational drug design and discovery, and other molecular structure/function relationships. He also has broad interests in intelligent systems, especially machine learning, constraint systems, and optimal heuristic search. Recently he has begun to explore DNA self-assembly, with applications to nanotechnology and biotechnology.