Ph.D Candidate
The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY)
Teaching Assistant in Chemistry
City University of New York-College of Staten Island (CSI)
Email: aonyema@gradcenter.cuny.edu, augustine.onyema@csi.cuny.edu
I am glad to welcome you to my website. Augustine is a computational biochemist who uses in silico tools to understand biochemical processes. Using molecular dynamics and free energy computational techniques, Augustine is currently studying the dynamics of cellular machinery like the nucleosome core particle (NCP) as implicated in different cancer types at Professor Sharon Loverde's Lab in the Chemistry department at the City University of New York-College of Staten Island. Looking point mutations at the histone core of the NCP, Augustine is studying how these mutations affect the stability of the NCP and the corresponding histone DNA interaction. Manuscript for the study will soon be submitted for peer review.
Furthermore, with funding from The Molecular Science Software Institute (MolSSI), Augustine is optimizing two code; to analyze the hydrogen bond dynamics (lifetime) of the hydrogen bonds in proteins and also to compute the kinetic correlation (Conditional Activity) of different domains in biomolecules including the nucleosome and other allosteric proteins.These codes will be made available on our GitHub page once they have gone through the peer review process.
Previously, Augustine has used different docking and chemo-informatics protocols to study the interaction of small molecules against key molecular targets involved in various clinical conditions, including type II diabetes and SARS-Cov2. To acknowledge Augustine achievements, he was spotlighted by the Graduate Center CUNY.
Latest News
Our new preprint on "Mapping Allosteric Communication in the Nucleosome with Conditional Activity" was published on bioRxiv. please use our code and cite us.
Recipient of the MDAnalysis Travel Grant to UGM In ASU, Arizona (Nov. 2025)
I presented my work on "Structural and Thermodynamic Impact of Oncogenic Mutations on the Nucleosome Core Particle" at the Fall 2025 meeting of the ACS in Washington, DC. Click here to see the poster.
Our work on the "Structural and Thermodynamic Impact of Oncogenic Mutations on the Nucleosome Core Particle" was published in the Biophysical Journal.
Recipient of the 2025 Rising Star Travel Award in Computational and Data Sciences at the Oden Institute in the University of Texas at Austin (April 2025)
Recipient of the Building Engagement (BE) award from the Sustainable Horizon Institute (SHI) to attend the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) CSE25 conference in Texas (March 2025)
Winner of the Black and Schwartz Science Travel award (Jan 2025-Jun 2025)
Poster presenter at the 5th Molecular Simulation Workshop at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), New Jersey, USA in Sept. 2024.
Recipient of the $15,000 CUNY Dissertation Fellowship for the 2024-2025 academic session.
Awarded a travel grant to attend the 8th i-CoMSE Workshop at UMN, Minneapolis in July 2024.
Awarded a travel grant for the MDAnalysis/MolSSI Workshop at Arizona State University, in Tempe, Arizona (AZ) in Jun 2024.
Winner of the 2024 Doctoral Student Research Grant (DSRG).