About Me

Augustine Onyema is a PhD candidate in the Biochemistry Program at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). He works at Sharon Loverde’s lab at the City University of New York-College of Staten Island (CSI). He employs computational methods to study the stability of the histone core of the nucleosome upon mutation as implicated in different cancer types, including head and neck cancers.

Augustine started his training in the sciences at the then Anambra State University (now Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University) in Anambra State, Nigeria. In the Biochemistry program, he studied the reactions needed to maintain cellular homeostasis and how small molecules regulate these reactions. His study climaxed with a project on how the phytochemicals in some African medicinal plants affect the enzyme activity of alcohol dehydrogenase. Under the tutelage of Professor Colin Banboye Lukong, Augustine graduated top of his class with a first class in Biochemistry. Augustine went for a master's degree in Pharmacological Biochemistry at the University of Nigeria Nsukka and studied the changes in the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) regions of different Candida types. The sequences generated from this study are domiciled in the NCBI database (GenBank IDs: MK871659-63).

To improve his skillsets, Augustine joined the doctoral program in Biochemistry at the Graduate Center-City University of New York (CUNY). Working under Professor Sharon Loverde, Augustine improved his skills in Computational Biochemistry while working on the stability of the nucleosome when the histone core is mutated, as seen in different cancer types. While working on this project, Augustine won two Doctoral Student Research Grants (DSRG), the 2023 MolSSI software fellowship, the 2024-2025 CUNY Dissertation award, and was a plenary speaker at the October 2023 integrative Structural Biology symposium organized by the New York Structural Biology Center (NYSBC) and The Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) at the CUNY-ASRC complex. The $40,000 MolSSI software fellowship has helped Augustine develop Python modules to study the hydrogen bond lifetimes and the conditional activity (kinetic correlation) of the side chain dihedral angles of amino acids in proteins. After peer review, these codes will be made public on GitHub to serve the scientific community, including enzymologists working on allostery. Besides basic PhD projects, Dr. Sharon Loverde has improved Augustine's mentoring skills by appointing him to mentor many undergraduate students on independent studies.

Augustine looks forward to a career in structural biology to understand the pathogenesis of different diseases. He loves giving back to society through volunteering and mentoring programs for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students.

• Molecular dynamics simulation of biological systems on AMBER, GROMACS, NAMD, and Anton2 supercomputers.

• Advanced Free Energy Calculations (MMGBSA, Umbrella Sampling)

• Computer-aided drug design (Autodock-vina)

• Conformation Sampling with Principal Component Analysis. 

• Software writing and packaging for analyzing biological systems using the Python Programming Language

• Project collaboration on git and GitHub.

• Data analysis on SPSS

• Team player and mentor to graduate and undergraduate students.

• Intermediate skills in Machine learning

• Operating systems known : MacOS, Linux - Ubuntu, Windows.

• Software: LaTeX, Microsoft packages, VMD, Pymol, git.