Molecular Dynamics:  Survey of Methods for Simulating the Activity of Proteins

Stewart A. Adcock was a recent postdoctoral researcher in J. Andrew McCammon's research group at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He was born in Norwich, England, in 1975. He received his MChem degree in Chemistry from the University of Sheffield and his D.Phil. degree from Oxford University. His doctoral research concerned the structural prediction and simulation of transmembrane proteins, under the guidance of W. G. Richards. Between 2001 and 2004 he was a UCSD research scholar, during which time he developed protocols and software for protein structure modeling and prediction. Currently, he is a scientific software consultant with Tessella Support Services PLC and has interest in high-performance scientific software and computing platforms.

J. Andrew McCammon is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and holds the Joseph E. Mayer Chair of Theoretical Chemistry at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He was born in Lafayette, Indiana, in 1947. He received his B.A. degree from Pomona College and his Ph.D. degree in Chemical Physics from Harvard University, where he worked with John Deutch on biological applications of statistical mechanics and hydrodynamics. In 1976−78 he was a research fellow at Harvard, where he developed the computer simulation approach to protein dynamics in collaboration with Martin Karplus. He joined the faculty of the University of Houston as Assistant Professor of Chemistry in 1978 and was appointed to the M. D. Anderson Chair at Houston in 1981. He moved to his current positions at UCSD in 1995. His industrial consulting started in 1987 with the establishment of the computer-aided drug discovery program of Agouron Pharmaceuticals. About 50 of his former students hold tenured or tenure-track positions at leading universities or research institutes. His awards include the George Herbert Hitchings Award for Innovative Methods in Drug Design from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Smithsonian Institution's Award for Breakthrough Computational Science, sponsored by Cray Research. New directions in his research group include theoretical efforts to understand how supramolecular and cellular activity emerge from the molecular level, particularly in neural synapses.