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Research Team
FightAIDS@Home
is a research project run by Prof.
Arthur Olson's laboratory in the Department of Molecular Biology at The Scripps Research Institute
in La Jolla, California. The FightAIDS@Home project also includes Prof. Rik Belew from the
Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego.
The Scripps Research Institute
Prof. Arthur J. Olson is the FightAIDS@Home project leader.
Prof. Olson is a professor
of molecular biology and Director of the Molecular Graphics Laboratory
at The Scripps Research Institute.
Professor Olson leads a large program project funded
by the National Institutes of Health to develop new
approaches to discover novel AIDS therapeutics based
upon our ever-increasing knowledge of the structural
biology of HIV.
Dr. Alex L. Perryman joined Prof. Olson's laboratory at TSRI on August 1st, 2007, and
runs the day-to-day operations of the FightAIDS@Home research. He has
been performing structure-based drug design research against HIV since joining
Prof. Andrew McCammon's laboratory at UCSD in 2000. Alex received a Ph.D. in 2005 from
the Biomedical Sciences program at the University of California, San Diego,
in the Pharmacology Dept. He was then an Amgen Postdoctoral Fellow in Prof. Stephen L. Mayo's lab at the California Institute of Technology
(Caltech) from 2005-2007, where he applied protein engineering to the design and optimization of anti-viral proteins. Alex is an expert at using information about protein
structures to guide the fight against disease. His research is focused on learning how to defeat multi-drug-resistant mutant "super bugs" and on designing
and evaluating potential new drugs that can help reduce human suffering.
Dr. Stefano Forli joined Prof. Olson's laboratory at TSRI on March 2008. He received his
Ph.D in 2006 in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Universita' degli Studi di Siena, Italy, after an
industrial fellowship in SienaBiotech. His main expertise is in docking, high throughput
virtual screening and structure-activity relationships. The aims of his research are to exploit
protein structural information to identify novel, potentially-active molecules and to overcome
multi-drug resistance.
Dr. Sargis Dallakyan is a Research Programmer III in Prof. Olson's lab. He is responsible for
the hardware and software environment for the "Molecular Graphics Laboratory," and he is the Lead Developer on the
Python Molecular Viewer (PMV), which we use during parts of the preparation and analysis of the experiments we perform on FightAIDS@Home.
Dr. Dallakyan received his Ph.D. from Yerevan Physics Institute .
Dr. Garrett
M. Morris is the FightAIDS@Home research project technical
contact. Dr. Morris is co-author of AutoDock, the rational
drug design software that runs on the FightAIDS@Home global Internet computing
grid.
Dr. Morris received a D.Phil. in Physical Chemistry from the University
of Oxford in 1991. His expertise is in computational chemistry and molecular
modeling, and he is the author of Cameleon, one of the first commercial
software products in bioinformatics. Although he is now a Research Manager at InhibOx, Ltd., Oxford, UK, he is still
helping us develop the software utilized in this project.
Former Team Members
Scott Kurowski is a software technologist and entrepreneur, applied
mathematician, amateur scientist, and aviator. Mr. Kurowski founded
Entropia, Inc. in 1997, and in 2000 he partnered with the Olson Lab at TSRI
to create FA@H to showcase the company's grid platform, while tackling a
major humanitarian goal. Since 1998, he has held executive R&D roles at
five start-up companies financed by a total of more than $175 million in
venture capital, where his award- and patent-winning teams developed wireless, enterprise, web and
multi-teraflop grids, products and services. Mr. Kurowski ported AutoDock
to Windows and the grid, and with Dr. Garrett Morris led the original
Entropia FA@H grid launched in October 2000 on 24,000 CPUs.
Dr. William Lindstrom received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California,
Santa Barbara. Prior to his graduate studies, he
had extensive experience in the software industry. He joined Dr. Olson's
laboratory in 2000, to pursue a post doctoral position in computer-aided drug design
against HIV protease. As of September, 2007, Dr. Lindstrom is a Scientist and Principal
Investigator for Acelot, Inc., Santa Barbara, CA, USA.
Dr. Alexandre Gillet is a Programmer and Systems Analyst; he was responsible for
the hardware and software environment in the Olson Laboratory. He received his Master's degree in Molecular Modelling
and Genome Analysis from the University of Paris 7, France, and recently received his doctorate in the
laboratory of Prof. Olson, at The Scripps Research Institute. Dr. Gillet is now a Software Engineer 2 at Illumina, Inc., San Diego, CA, USA.
Dr. Max Chang received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in Computer Science under
the supervision of Prof. Rik Belew. Dr. Chang is now a Research Associate in the lab of one of our collaborators,
Prof. Bruce Torbett at TSRI, La Jolla, CA.
University of California, San Diego
Prof. Rik Belew is a Professor of of Computer Science, with special
research interests in machine learning and free-text information retrieval.
We are working together with other laboratories here
at Scripps and elsewhere,
to design, synthesize and test new HIV protease inhibitors
that are better than existing drugs in defeating the
virus's ability to develop drug resistance
Our collaborators include:
The Elder Laboratory - Virology
The Olson Laboratory - Computational Chemistry
The Finn Research Group - Synthetic Chemistry
The Stout Laboratory - Xray Crystallography
The Torbett Laboratory - Cell Biology
The Fokin Laboratory - Synthetic Chemistry
David J. Looney, M.D. - Chief Infection Control Officer and Medical Director of Special Infectious Diseases Clinic, VA San Diego Healthcare System.
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