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!

Congratulations to Dali WANG, who has won the “CLS Postdoctoral Fellowship”! With this prestigious postdoctoral fellowship awarded by the “Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences”, Dali will continue to work with us in the group after his PhD graduation.

Dr. Chen SONG was invited to give a talk at “The Ninth National Conference on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology” in Shanghai on 28 September. This was one of the first offline conferences since the COVID-19 in 2020.

Most of the group members have returned to the University lately. And we have two new members joining the group, Qingyang HU and Song YANG, PhD candidates from CQB and CLS, respectively.

As the secretary-general, Dr. Chen SONG organized “The 3^rd Worldwide Chinese Computational Biology Conference” together with Prof. Luhua LAI, Prof. Chao TANG, and Dr. Zhiyuan LI. The conference was successfully held online by using Zoom meeting and Koushare live streaming on 3-6 August.  64 invited speakers presented their wonderful work and more than 500 attendees participated in the meeting. The online conference was more smooth and popular than we had expected. Many thanks to everyone who helped and contributed! We are getting used to online academic exchanges, which should not be stopped for any reason.

Hua’s work on the antimicrobial peptide PSI has appeared online at https://doi.org/10.1074/jbc.RA120.014311. This is a collaborative project from three groups: the Yada lab from the University of British Columbia, the Wang lab from Beijing NMR Center, and us. The paper has been selected as one of the “Editors’ Picks” of Journal of Biological Chemistry, a great honor from the journal (about 1 out of 100 published papers).

A big congratulation to Chunhong, who has won the Peking University President’s Scholarship (北京大学校长奖学金) ！Chunhong has been working on MD simulations of Ca²⁺-permeable ion channels, and has done an excellent job.

We have been having online group meetings for months. Without a spring retreat this year, we decided to take a group photo in the video meeting today.