2024-05-22
- 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...
2024-04-12 - A computational model of the more than 26 million atoms in a DNA-packed viral capsid expands our understanding of virus structure and DNA dynamics, insights that could provide new research avenues and drug targets, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers report in the journal Nature. Read more at Phys Org under the article,...
2022-09-12 - Biophysics professor emeritus Govindjee is a recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society of Photosynthesis Research. This honor is the result of a lifetime of key contributions to chlorophyll fluorescence induction and photosystem II function. Read more about Govindjee's Lifetime Achievement Award.
2022-06-27 - The Illinois Biophysics (IB) Third Annual Graduate Research & Networking Symposium was held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Illini Union on April 19th, 2022. The student-led event featured research presentations, poster sessions, discussion groups, and valuable opportunities for academic and social networking.This year’s symposium hosted over 70 attendees including...
2022-03-03 - Imagine Bach’s “Cello Suite No. 1” played on a strand of DNA.This scenario is not as impossible as it seems. Too small to withstand a rhythmic strum or sliding bowstring, DNA is a powerhouse for storing audio files and all kinds of other media.“DNA is nature’s original data storage system. We can use it to store any kind of data: images, video, music — anything,” said Kasra Tabatabaei, a...
2021-12-13 - Dr. Taras Pogorelov's advisee, Haolin Luo, was awarded the National Center for Supercomputing Applications' Fiddler Innovation Fellowship. Luo was one of twenty Illinois undergraduate and graduate students and faculty who were named and recognized during the 2021 Fiddler Innovation Award virtual ceremony in November.Undergraduate Fiddler Fellows are selected for their exceptional contributions to...
2021-11-09 - Scientists have labored for decades to find antibiotics that work against Gram-negative bacteria, which cause some of the deadliest infections in hospital settings and are most likely to be resistant to treatment with existing antibiotics. In a study reported in the journal Chemical Science, researchers developed a new method to determine how antibiotics with specific chemical properties thread...
2021-10-14 - Thirty-three new investigators will join the community of Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigators, including Biophysics and Quantitative Biology alumna Elizabeth Villa.Elizabeth graduated with a doctoral degree in Biophysics in 2008; her research, which focused on multiscale modeling of biomolecular complexes, was advised by the late Professor Klaus Schulten.“UIUC is my academic home...
2021-09-10 - Our sense of hearing is stimulated by the sound transmitted through the external auditory canal to the middle ear and then to the inner ear. The hair cells in the inner ear are known as the sensory cells of hearing and are capable of mechano-electrical transduction—the mechanism by which cells convert a mechanical stimulus into an electrical signal—and signal amplification, which mechanically...
2021-08-24 - Biophysics and Quantitative Biology student Kevin Cheng has recently been selected to serve on the Graduate College Students Advising on Graduate Education (SAGE) board. A leadership opportunity for graduate students at Illinois, SAGE promotes active engagement with programs and initiatives offered by the Graduate College and aims to enhance the academic, professional, and social experience of...
2021-06-02 - The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) attacks cells that help the body fight infection, thus making the human body more vulnerable to other infections and diseases. Until this day, HIV remains a global pandemic of large proportions. Upon infection, inactive or latently infected cells capable of reactivating following treatment removal remain the major barrier to curing HIV.Drug treatments...
2021-05-20 - Shriyaa Mittal received a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s degree in computational natural science from the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, India. She obtained her doctoral degree in biophysics and quantitative biology from the Center for Biophysics and Quantitative Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in Summer...
2021-03-18 - To maintain normal brain function, the extracellular levels of necessary neurotransmitters, such as glutamate—a major chemical signal responsible for communication between brain cells– have to be kept low to avoid excessive stimulation of receptors and nerve cell damage, a pathological process otherwise referred to as excitotoxicity.Using a cool twisting, elevator-like mechanism inside the cell...
2021-03-01 - In order to infect cells, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, needs to insert itself into the membrane of human cells. New molecular models show what parts of SARS-CoV-2 are critical for that interaction, revealing new potential drug targets. In a new research presented by Biophysics student Defne Gorgun, from the lab of Professor Emad Tajkhorshid, at the 65th Annual Meeting of the...
2021-02-10 - Chaoyi Jin graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with a doctoral degree in biophysics and quantitative biology in August 2019. He also holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Nanjing University, China.During his graduate studies at UIUC, Chaoyi focused his research on mechanisms of learning and memory. He studied dynamics and location re-arrangement of ionotropic...