Congratulations to WANG Lei, who won the CQB scholarship (Grade 3) of the year, again!

Congratulations to Jiaxuan, who has passed the Ph.D. qualifying exam with an excellent grade!

Invited by Dr. SONG, Prof. XU Dong from the University of Missouri-Columbia gave us an online CQB seminar entitled “Graph Neural Networks to Learn Long-range Interactions in Proteins from Molecular Dynamics Simulations” on Jan 11, 2021. Around 140 attendees participated in the event, and it’s very interesting to see how graph neural networks can be used to identify the allosteric pathways from MD trajectories.

We invited Dr. YANG Jianyi from Nankai University to give us a seminar at CQB on Dec 21. Jianyi is an expert in protein structure prediction, who developed the well-known software trRosetta. He also contributed to the development of I-TASSER. The seminar was entitled “Protein and RNA structure prediction based on deep learning”, and attracted much attention both offline and online.

Dr. Chen SONG was invited to give a talk at the “International Symposium of Biophysics and Soft Matter Frontiers” at Shandong University, Jinan, on Dec 19. It was a combination of offline and online symposium, and researchers from four countries and regions presented their latest work.

It was our great pleasure to invite Prof. Gaetano T. Montelione to give us an online seminar entitled “Proteins Flex to Function: Roles of Conformational Plasticity in Protein Function”. Prof. Montelione is currently endowed chair in structural bioinformatics and professor of chemistry at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, well known as an expert and innovator in the fields of structural biology and protein NMR. The seminar reminded us that the dynamic nature of proteins should always be kept in mind in the structural and functional studies of proteins.

Congratulations to Dali, who has passed his PhD thesis defense on Nov 27. Dr. Dali WANG will continue to work with us as a postdoc, under the support of the CLS fellowship.

Dr. Chen SONG was invited to give a talk at the “Multiscale Modeling for Biotherapeutics Symposium” on Nov 19, an event organized by Schrödinger, Inc.

Invited by Dr. Chen SONG, Dr. Phillip J. Stansfeld delivered an online seminar at CQB entitled “Modelling Interactions and Transport Processes within the Cell Envelope”. Dr. Stansfeld is an associate professor at the School of Life Sciences & Department of Chemistry, University of Warwick, UK. He developed a highly informative database for all membrane protein structures, called MemProtMD, by using multiscale molecular dynamics simulations.

Two of the group members left the group lately. Dr. Hua YU has found a faculty position at Shandong Agricultural University after working in the group as a postdoc for four years. Xiaoqian ZHANG has got her master’s degree and is a high school teacher at Qingdao now. Farewell and best of luck!