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Yicheng Tu Receives NIH Grant for Interdisciplinary Scientific Simulation Research

Yicheng Tu, professor of computer science and engineering and principal investigator, has been awarded a four-year R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), totaling $1,149,236 for “Data Management Molecular Simulations – A Throughput-Oriented Approach.”

This is a collaborative project between Tu's group in CSE and those of H. Lee Woodcock from the USF Department of Chemistry. The project addresses key data management challenges in performing molecular simulations, which is a major computational tool in studying the structure, dynamics, and thermodynamics of biomolecules. Work such as this will greatly impact many fields of medical research such as discovery of new medicines, biomimetic material design, and pathology/diagnosis of diseases.

The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has become a worldwide disaster claiming more than 4.5 million lives. Using computer simulation and analysis to gain insight in the molecular level details of the virus has the potential to shed significant new light onto this critical challenge. The combination of these new insights has great potential to assist biologist and chemists in their rush to not only develop an effective vaccine, but also understand any possible limitations of it.