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 biophyscis research at Prof. Jianhan Chen's lab. I am particularly interested in molecular mechanism studies to elucidate protein structure-function relationship using computational methods. I have been studing ion channel activation and gating mechanisms using all-atom simulations, including TMEM16F and TRPV4, and also HCN1 ion channel. Besides, I also found coarse-grained force field development and application super interesting and studied protein domain-domain interactions using coarse-grained simulations. Lastly, I have a growing interesting in machine learning and deep learning methods for computational biophysics (see the Research page for details).
where I have been to
I began studying chemistry in 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 Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2019. During this time, I learnt how to do organic synthesis starting from synthetic route design, basic protein expression procedure (PCR, *E. coli* expression, purification, and characterization) as well as genetic code expansion technique for incorporation of an unnatural amino acid into specific sites of a protein. My main outcome at this stage was the discovery and development of a artificial photo-enzyme which can use synthetic photosensitive unnatural amino acid to catalze dehalogenation reactions.
My interest shifted to computational biophysics after my master's study. I got a industry job for about 2 years in 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 modelling and ddg calculations) for protein and peptide drug design. I designed programs to identify unstable sites of antibodies only based on their sequences, providing a early-stage computational screening for antibody development and optimization. For antibody modeling, I worked with other colleagues on developing an antibody database for furture screening and optimization. Another project worthy of mentioning is that our team used ROSETTA to predict possible mutations in the spike protein of COVID19 virus that could enhance its ability to infect human cells DOI. I helped our biomolecule design team created a Chinese version ROSETTA learning platform to provide a more friendly ROSETTA resources to inspire more Chinese learners.
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 Al-driven computational modeling. If you know any relevant positions, please email me! Thanks.