About
Where I am now: Department of Chemistry, UMass Amherst
Recently, I have successfully defended my PhD dissertation and graduated from UMass Amherst. For the past five years, I have been performing computational biophysics research at Prof. Jianhan Chen's lab. I am particularly interested in molecular mechanism studies to elucidate protein structure-function relationships using computational methods. I have been studying ion channel activation and gating mechanisms using all-atom simulations, including TMEM16F and TRPV4, and also the HCN1 ion channel. I also find coarse-grained force field development and application very interesting and have studied protein domain-domain interactions using coarse-grained simulations. Lastly, I have a growing interest in machine learning and deep learning methods for computational biophysics (see the Research page for details).
Where I have been
I began studying chemistry at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2012, after which I decided to dive deeper into the biochemistry world. I earned my Master's degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2019. During this time, I learned how to perform organic synthesis starting from synthetic route design, basic protein expression procedures (PCR, *E. coli* expression, purification, and characterization) as well as genetic code expansion techniques for incorporating unnatural amino acids into specific sites of a protein. My main outcome at this stage was the discovery and development of an artificial photo-enzyme that uses a synthetic photosensitive unnatural amino acid to catalyze dehalogenation reactions.
My interest shifted to computational biophysics after my master's studies. I held an industry position for about 2 years at XtalPi Co. as a biomolecular drug designer, during which I honed my skills in computational modeling for macromolecules and using ROSETTA (such as ligand docking, homology modeling, and ΔΔG calculations) for protein and peptide drug design. I designed programs to identify unstable sites of antibodies based solely on their sequences, providing an early-stage computational screening pipeline for antibody development and optimization. For antibody modeling, I worked with colleagues to develop an antibody database for future screening and optimization. Another noteworthy project was our team's use of ROSETTA to predict mutations in the spike protein of the COVID-19 virus that could enhance its ability to infect human cells DOI. I also helped our biomolecule design team create a Chinese-language ROSETTA learning platform to provide more accessible ROSETTA resources for a broader Chinese audience.
Where/What I intend to go/do next
I will continue working in Prof. Jianhan Chen's lab for a short time as a Post-doc. Meanwhile, I have been searching for possible positions in both academia and industry. I have strong interests in computation-aided drug discovery and design, protein and peptide design, and AI-driven computational modeling. If you know any relevant positions, please email me! Thanks.