This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for FY 2006. The fellowship supports research and training at the postdoctoral level at the intersection of biology and the informational, computational, mathematical, and statistical sciences. The goal of the fellowship is to provide training to a young scientist in preparation for a career in biological informatics in which research and education will be integrated. There is an increasing need for training in biological informatics at all occupational levels, and it is expected that Fellows trained through these fellowships will play important roles in training the future workforce.
The research and training plan for this fellowship is entitled "A Coarse-grained molecular dynamics study of ion channel self assembly." This research seeks to extend all atom (AA) molecular dynamics (MD) computer simulations currently used to describe complex interactions between proteins and membranes to self-assembly of ion channels by introducing novel course grained (CG) MD techniques. The new simulations are expected to deal effectively with larger molecules over longer time scales and require fewer computational resources.
The training goals include developing theoretical methods and parallel code, learning force field parameterization, and performing simulations to give insight into relevant biological problems.
