Willy Wriggers Activities and Interests

As a full-time member of D.E. Shaw Research (DESRES), I work in a collaborative "think tank" like environment with other senior theoretical and computational researchers. I'm interested in statistical sampling of molecular dynamics (MD) trajectories as well as simulated folding and the prediction of large scale domain movements of biomolecules. We are mainly focused on basic research questions related to long-time MD simulations. Software developed at DESRES will be freely disseminated to the academic community and published in reputable, peer-reviewed journals.

Thanks to a very generous contract at DESRES I am also able to pursue independent interests in my free time. For example, I hold an academic appointment at the associate professor level at Weill Cornell Medical College where I am exchanging ideas with coworkers in the Weinstein lab on coarse grained and continuum elastic models relevant in cell biology and systems biology.

Also, I remain committed in an advisory role to the lab I founded in Houston. Stefan Birmanns and his team are carrying on many of the projects we've started during my time there. In the current transition phase we are completing a number of joint publications. My involvement will decrease as fundraising and research activities will pass on to the next academic generation.

Here is a partial list of software projects I am involved in:

• TimeScapes MD Trajectory Analysis Tools (soon available at DESRES).
• Situs Popular UNIX-based multi-scale docking suite which I developed with coworkers since 1999.
• Sculptor Interactive visualization and modeling program developed since 2001 with main author Stefan Birmanns.
• EMotion Server of elastic network animations of EM maps.

You can also read about my past research interests here.