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Wriggers
Receives Prestigious Alfred P. Sloan
Research Fellowship
Willy Wriggers, Ph.D.
New faculty member Willy Wriggers, Ph.D., director of the Structural Bioinformatics program at The University of Texas School of Health Information Sciences (SHIS) at Houston, has been awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Computational and Evolutionary Molecular Biology.
The fellowship supports computationally sophisticated young scientists who wish to pursue a multi-disciplinary career and to apply their computational expertise to the complex problems facing molecular biology. The award supports up to two years of research.
“The entrepreneurial inspiration of Alfred P. Sloan is very appropriate for Houston,” Wriggers said. “I’m very satisfied to see my work held in such high esteem, but much of my success is due to the collaborations I’ve been fortunate enough to have over the years.”
Wriggers pioneered the use of modern information processing techniques to combine structural data obtained from a variety of biophysical and biochemical sources, such as x-ray crystallography, electron microscopy, small-angle x-ray scattering, biochemical cross-linking and mutagenesis.
This combination of information is used to create 3D images and structural maps of proteins, which are then used to determine the protein’s shape, motion, variation and/or function. Such detailed structural analysis is used to identify important targets for drug design, and to understand how structural changes in proteins contribute to human diseases.
Wriggers is also an adjunct faculty member of the Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases (IMM) at the UT Health Science Center at Houston. He has a doctorate in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and experience in software development and project management in biomolecular modeling, artificial neural networks, visualization and biophysics.
Before joining the SHIS faculty, Wriggers was an assistant professor of molecular biology at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, Calif. His awardwinning Situs software, initiated in 1999 during his postdoctoral tenure at the University of California, San Diego, is now the most widely used 3D registration program in electron microscopy.
“I’m fascinated by the opportunities that SHIS, an innovative young graduate school, presents in developing a ‘grassroots’ teaching and research approach,” Wriggers said. “The SHIS leadership has placed the school at the focal point of two converging disciplines: the study of biomedical processes in the cell and human body, perhaps best exemplified by the world-class work done in the neighboring IMM, and the development of advanced computer technology that drives today’s biomedical discoveries at an astonishing pace.”
By Kimberly Malone, Ph.D., Public Affairs
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