2024 has been quite a busy year, yet somehow I’ve managed to avoid posting anything! Here’s a round-up of some of the many facets of the lab from 2024 (so far):
- January 2024: Chemistry PhD student Starwing Chen joins the Voelz Lab — welcome Starwing!
- February 10–14, 2024: The Biophysical Society Annual Meeting comes to Philadelphia. Five Voelz Lab members attend, four present!
- March 17–20, 2024: Dylan Novack and PI Vincent Voelz give dueling talks (same time, different sessions) at the American Chemical Society Spring Meeting in New Orleans, LA. Dylan’s talk: “Can massively parallel free energy calculations improve in silico affinity maturation of de novo designed miniproteins?” (COMP Drug Design session) Vince’s talk: “Multi-ensemble Markov Model approaches for folding, binding, and design” (COMP invited symposium on Markov State Modeling of Conformational Dynamics in the Wake of Machine Learning)
- May 6, 2024: Robert Raddi gets a Ph.D! His thesis, “A Bayesian Inference/Maximum Entropy Approach for Optimization and Validation of Empirical Molecular Models” is focused on major theoretical advances to our BICePs algorithm and its applications. Congratulations Rob!
- May 23, 2024: Chemistry grad student Julie Nguyen advances to candidacy with a successful defense of her Original Research Proposal “Exploring the Mechanism of Molecular Glues in Modulating CRBN’s Selectivity in CK1α Degradation Using Computational Methods”. Congrats Julie!
- June 11, 2024: Dylan Novack gets a Ph.D.! Their thesis, “Molecular Simulation of Mutation Effects on Protein Folding and Function” focused on Markov model and alchemical free energy approaches made possible though distributed computing on Folding@home.
- July 2024: PI Vincent Voelz is promoted to Full Professor of Chemistry at Temple University.
- August 2024: Starwing Chen presents a poster and flash talk at the 12th Peptoid Summit: “Benchmarking peptoid force fields against solution NMR data”
- September 2024: Temple Bioinformatics Ph.D. student Jason Cargill joins the lab — welcome Jason!
- October 2024: The Annual Voelz Lab Halloween Group Meeting is a unmitigated success.
Happy Halloween from the Voelz Lab!