Ron Levy, director of CST’s Center for Biophysics and Computational Biology, Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Chemistry, and Laura H. Carnell Professor, Emeritus, has received the 2024 American Chemical Society (ACS) Philadelphia Section Award.
The ACS award recognizes members of the ACS Philadelphia Section who have made significant scientific contributions to the field of chemistry and the chemical society through their scholarship and service. The award is given to individuals whose work has not only advanced the discipline but has also enhanced public appreciation of the profession.
As part of the award presentation and reception, Levy will give a public lecture on “The Joy of Science: Exploring Protein Landscapes,” on the evening of Wednesday, October 30, in the Science Education and Research Center (SERC) at Temple. For event details and free registration for the 7:00 p.m. lecture, click here.
Levy is one of the founding members of the group of scientists who developed molecular dynamics simulations of proteins into the powerful technique widely used today in biophysics, chemistry, and structural biology.
“There was a group of researchers working in the Martin Karplus group at Harvard in the 1970s and 80s” explained Levy, “and this group worked to develop extremely powerful computational tools that are used today to understand the fundamentals of how proteins function, map their conformational landscapes, and enable drug development. Nowadays, we use machine learning as well as molecular simulations.”
Since joining CST in 2014, Levy’s research funding totals nearly $14m from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. “We’ve been spending almost a decade now combining ideas and concepts from machine learning with ideas and concepts from molecular dynamics simulations,” said Levy. “In our recent paper published in Nature Communications we explored how two very important subfamilies of protein kinases evolved to have distinct functions, using molecular dynamics simulations alongside a machine learning method borrowed from physics.”
Levy’s talk will begin with a brief review of a lifetime experiencing the "joy of science" and an overview of his working life as a professional computational chemist and biophysicist. He'll touch on some of his earlier work with molecular dynamics simulations of proteins and explain what it means to "explore protein landscapes." He’ll then briefly present his more recent work concerning the kinase family proteins.
Levy joined Temple University in 2014, after a career at Rutgers University, where he rose to Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. “I came to CST because there was a strong commitment, from the college and from then-dean Michael Klein, and then-provost Hai-Lung Dai, to really building up computation research here,” said Levy.
“I’ve been committed to research my whole professional career,” explained Levy. “This year marks 42 years of continuous funding and with our most recent grants it will be 46 years of continuous funding. I'm really proud of that.”