Members

Title: Principal Investigator

Ed received his Ph.D. in physics from Virginia Tech, where he studied nonequilibrium critical phenomena with Beate Schmittmann. He then did a post-doc in the Department of Computational Biology at the University of Pittsburgh with Dan Zuckerman. While in Pittsburgh he focused on methods development for biomolecular simulation, with an emphasis on statistically rigorous approaches for sampling protein conformation space. He then moved to Salt Lake City, UT, where he joined the lab of Greg Voth. In Utah he worked on membrane protein simulation and multiscale simulation methods development. He joined the faculty at the University of Delaware in January 2011 with a primary appointment in Physics and Astrophysics and a secondary appointment in Chemistry and Biochemistry. He was promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure in May 2017.

Title: Graduate Student

Shea joined the group in 2019, passed his written candidacy exam in physics on his first try, and then crushed his oral candidacy exam the following year. He is developing computational methods to measure membrane viscosity and dynamic response in simulations.

Research Projects: 

Membrane dynamics

Title: Graduate Student

Miguel received his BS in Physics from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogota. He joined us as a PhD student at UD in September 2021. He is developing graph neural network representations of membrane proteins to predict lipid binding sites.

Research Projects: 

Lipid-protein interactions

Title: Graduate Student

Sasiri received her BS in Physics from the Universidad de Valle in Calí, Colombia. She joined us as a PhD student at UD in September 2022. She is working to understand the pressure dependent elastic properties of marine invertebrate (ctenophore) membranes.

Research Projects: 

Membrane elasticity

Title: Undergraduate researcher

Chris is pursuing undergraduate degrees in Physics and Computer Science, with the goal of pursuing graduate work in at the intersection of AI and physics. Chris's research focuses on developing graph-based neural networks for protein structure encoding.

Research Projects: 

Lipid protein interactions

Title: Graduate Student

Bivek joined us as a PhD student at UD in Spring 2023. He is developing graphical neural network representations of membrane proteions for classification tasks and to develop new ways of understanding lipid-protein interactions.

Research Projects: 

Membrane elasticity

Title: Graduate Student

Diego received his BS in Physics from the Universidad de Valle in Calí, Colombia. He joined us as a PhD student at UD in September 2023. He studies membrane elastic response, with a specific focus on inelastic neutron scattering measurements.

Research Projects: 

Membrane elasticity