Faculty

Sameer Varma

Professor

CONTACT

Office: ISA 6205
Phone: (813) 974-9288
Lab: ISA 6050A
Email

EDUCATION

  • B.Sc. Physics, Indian Institute of Technology
  • Ph.D. Biophysics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

  • Postdoctoral Fellow, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque
  • Research Assistant Professor, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago

RESEARCH

Computational Biology and Biophysics

Molecular mechanics (MM) and quantum mechanics (QM) simulations are fast becoming powerful alternatives to wet lab experiments for studying the structure, dynamics and activity regulation of biomolucules. Our primary goals are to further enhance their capabilities for treating systems that function through increasingly more complex interactions. We have ongoing projects to (a) improve accuracy of MM force fields for treating ion-protein, ion-nucleotide and ion-lipid interactions, (b) develop hybrid QM/MM methods for predicting protein-ligand binding free energies, (c) build machine learning models for accelerating QM simulations, and (d) train machine learning models for analyzing correlated big data from simulations. We also apply QM and MM simulations in collaboration with experimental groups to address key unresolved biophysical questions in allosteric signaling, ion-protein interactions and protein-protein interactions.

GRADUATE STUDENTS

  • Karla Diaz Castillo (joint with Dr Daughdrill)
  • Guy Dayhoff
  • Julián Meléndez Delgado
  • Irene Gutierrez
  • Koushik Majumdar
  • Matthew Saunders (joint with Dr Pandit)
  • Giorgio Schillaci