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Assistant Professor of Chemistry Adam W. Van Wynsberghe attended the 7th annual National Biomedical Computation Resource Summer Institute at the University of California-San Diego, July 30-Aug. 3, and presented the summer research of Leah Krause ’13. Other Van Wynsberghe lab members who contributed to the research included Alvin Wu ’13, Dan Mermelstein ’14 and Jeremy Adelman ’13.

Rob Clayton ’15 and Leah Krause ’14 presented their research at the 11th Molecular Educational Research Consortium in Undergraduate Computational chemistRY (MERCURY) conference at Bucknell University. Both students have been working this summer in the laboratory of Assistant Professor of Chemistry Adam Van Wynsberghe.

A paper recently published by Assistant Professor of Chemistry Adam Van Wynsberghe received notice in two different venues in the past month. It was featured on the Oak Ridge National Labs’ supercomputing center website and was named a “must-read” by the post-publication review service Faculty of 1000.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Adam Van Wynsberghe was a contributing author of a paper published in the Oct. 25 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. (PNAS)

Over the weekend of July 29,  Dan Mermelstein’14, Carmen Montagnon ’13 and Alvin Wu ’13 presented their research at the 10th Molecular Educational Research Consortium in Undergraduate Computational chemistRY (MERCURY) conference at Bucknell University. The three students have been working this summer in the laboratory of Assistant Professor of Chemistry Adam Van Wynsberghe.

Influenza viruses spread quickly, are quite common and can have devastating consequences. Thus, drugs that help restrict the spread of influenza not only shorten the sickness, but save lives. This summer Daniel Mermelstein ’14, Carmen Montagnon ’13 and Alvin Wu ’13 are conducting research under Assistant Professor of Chemistry Adam Van Wynsberghe to examine the chemical interactions that these important drugs rely on to combat the flu.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Adam Van Wynsberghe,was a contributing author of a paper published in the June issue of the journal Chemical Biology and Drug Design. The paper, titled “Applying Molecular Dynamics Simulations to Identify Rarely Sampled Ligand bound Conformational States of Undecaprenyl Pyrophosphate Synthase, an Antibacterial Target,” presents the results of research conducted in collaboration with researchers at the University of California-San Diego, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Assistant Professors of Chemistry Nicole L. Snyder and Adam Van Wynsberghe have each received a Cottrell College Science Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. These grants each supply $35,000 for the investigators’ research programs and include funds for equipment, supplies, and faculty and student stipends. Fifty-seven of these awards were funded nationally in 2010.

In 1918, the global influenza pandemic struck millions of families, killing a jaw-dropping 3 percent of the world’s population at the time. Scientists since devised a treatment to stop the flu infection from spreading within the body. With the recent emergence of a particularly virulent strain of avian influenza, H5N1, and the rise of the highly transmissible but somewhat less virulent pandemic H1N1 “swine flu” in 2009, many fear a repeat of this serious and lethal world health crisis. The common drugs used for treatment of influenza are far from perfect, and they sometimes act in unexpected ways on the molecular level. Working with Assistant Professor of Chemistry Adam Van Wynsberghe, Erica Losito ’12 and Jeremy Adelman ’13 are taking a closer look at exactly what happens when the virus and the drug interact, in two different ways.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Adam Van Wynsberghe was awarded an allocation of supercomputing time on the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas in Austin. It's a grant that allows him and the students in his group to access this very powerful resource -- it will help them to carry out their simulations at a much faster rate than they could with the current on-campus resources.