Congratulations to Biophysics Graduate Student Thanh Lai for being awarded a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship in this year's competition! The Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship supports outstanding doctoral students who have achieved candidacy and are actively working on unusually creative, ambitious, impactful dissertation research and writing.
The Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship is one of the most prestigious awards granted by Rackham Graduate School. Doctoral candidates who expect to graduate within six years since beginning their degrees are eligible to apply, and the strength and quality of their dissertation abstract, publications and presentations, and recommendations are all taken into consideration when granting this award.
Read his abstract below!
Thanh Lai, Biophysics
For some protein targets, drug-target residence time—or the duration of time a drug molecule is bound to its target protein—is a stronger indicator of in vivo drug efficacy than conventional metrics such as binding affinity. However, optimizing a drug’s residence time to its target protein (i.e., ”kinetics-oriented” drug design) is difficult, as little is often known about the mechanisms of how a drug unbinds from its target protein. My thesis aims to provide high-throughput in silico tools to study small molecule unbinding events, thereby clarifying and accelerating the process of kinetics-oriented drug design.
