1984, Ph.D. in Chemical Physics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
1979, B.S. in Chemistry, Royal Holloway College, London University
My long–term research philosophy/interests are (1) to unravel the underlying physico–chemical principles governing biological processes and use them to guide the design of molecules with potential practical/therapeutic utility, and (2) to develop new methods for studying macromolecular systems. Our current research is focused in the following three areas:
1. Protein Binding and Folding: this involves a systematic study of the individual forces governing protein-cofactor, protein-protein and protein-nucleic acid binding affinity and specificity.
2. Structure-Based Rational Drug Design: our focus is on the structure-based rational design of antibiotics and antibody-based therapeutics.
3. New Algorithms and Theory: we are developing new methods to predict various binding sites and protein interaction partners as well as implicit solvent models for molecular dynamics/docking simulations.
A variety of computational methods are employed including ab initio quantum mechanics methods, molecular dynamics/free energy simulations, continuum dielectric methods, solvation theory, protein docking, homology modeling, and database mining. The above research in bioinformatics, computational biophysics and computational chemistry is at the interface of biology, physics, chemistry, and computer science, thus students will develop interdisciplinary knowledge and skills.