Thiago is a Ph.D. candidate in Science with an emphasis in Organic and Biological Chemistry at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. His work is in the Integration of tools in Bio and Cheminformatics for the study of protease cysteine inhibitors. He obtained his Master’s degree in Chemistry at the University of São Paulo, São Carlos, with an International internship at the University of Nottingham, UK, thanks to funding through CAPES PROEX. He obtained his Bachelors in Chemistry at the Federal University of Ceará, where he was also a student of the Science without Borders program in the United States (Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio).

Erich graduated from the the Molecular Biophysics & Structural Biology (MBSB) Ph.D. program. He received his bachelors in Chemistry from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and his M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests focus on computer-aided drug discovery, virtual screening, molecular dynamics simulations, and weighted ensemble path sampling.

Sayuri Pacheco is currently a visiting research scholar at the University of Pittsburgh working in Dr. Jacob’s Durrant lab. She obtained her B.S in biochemistry at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) in 2018. Her research interests focus on studying protein structure and dynamics by experimental and computational methods. Her previous research included using molecular dynamics simulations to study the pH-dependent mechanism of a chaperone protein found in pathogenic gram-negative bacteria.

Bridget is a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh studying bioinformatics. She is interested in uniting her interests in computing and the biological sciences in order to solve biomedical problems at a more complex level.

Following grad-school Christian is interested in pursuing a career in academia. Current research interests include protein folding, protein-protein interactions (especially virus-host protein interactions), and discovery of new (synthetic?) antibiotics to help people struggling with antibiotic resistant illnesses.

Katie is a senior Bioinformatics major interested in studying epidemiology for the purpose of treating disease in underserved communities. She hopes that applying computers to biological data can help us determine the mechanisms of disease and how to inhibit their propogation. She’s currently participating in the lab’s ongoing Yeast-genetics efforts.

Nivedita is currently a senior at Pitt majoring in Molecular Biology (Cell and Developmental) with a minor in Computer Science. Her future plans involve pursuing a career in the biotech/bioinformatics industry. She has a few years of wet-lab research experience in molecular biology, but she is transitioning more towards working with and developing bioinformatics software. One area that she is especially interested in is the use of bioinformatics tools to analyze genes and improve upon methods for disease prediction, diagnosis, and treatment.

Jack is a senior Biology major at the university of Pittsburgh hoping to pursue pharmacology as a post graduate. His interests are in protein and chemical interactions in the body. He hopes to some day work on therapeutic drug development.

Jacob is a graduate student in the Molecular Biophysics and Structural Biology PhD program. He received his Bachelors of Engineering in Biomedical Engineering at Stony Brook University in 2013. He spent 4 years working with Dr. Roger Hendrix at the University of Pittsburgh studying the structure and function of the tail assembly chaperones and major tail tube protein of bacteriophage λ. He joined the Durrant lab in 2017 and is interested in CADD, MD, Virtual screening, genetic algorithms, and python tool design.