Xuenan Mi receives the Graduate Student Excellence Award from the American Chemical Society

Xuenan Mi, a graduate student in Professor Shukla's group, is the winner of the Chemical Computing Group Research Excellence student award from the Computers in Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society. The award recognizes outstanding research performance by graduate students in computational chemistry.

Xuenan’s PhD research is focused on peptide drug discovery and design using a combination of molecular dynamics simulation and deep learning models. Specifically, her research centers on ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs) that have diverse biological activities. In her work, She utilizes computational approaches to design and engineer novel RiPPs with desired properties.

Xuenan’s PhD research is supervised by Professor Diwakar Shukla, who is a faculty in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Center for Biophysics and Quantitative Biology. “Xuenan is not only an excellent scientist but also an excellent member of my research group, who is always eager to mentor and help other students. This is a well-deserved honor for her efforts as a graduate student,” says Shukla. Other graduate students in the Shukla group have been selected to receive this award—Soumajit Dutta (Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering) and Austin T. Weigle (Chemistry) won the Graduate Student Excellence Award in 2023.

“This award will enable me to broaden my professional network and gain valuable insights into the cutting-edge developments in computational research for drug discovery, which are crucial to my career as a scientist,” says Xuenan.