Dec 8, 2016
The Chen lab is relocating to Univeristy of Massachusetts Amherst. Today is the last day, of all the great time that we have so fortunately enjoyed at Kansas State University and Manhattan! KSU has been such a great family, and we will dearly miss our friends, wonderful colleagues, and the midwestern charm! Best wishes to KSU, Manhattan and everyone ...

A few last (and lasting) memories ...

(Bill Synder Family Stadium, F16; We own Texas; EMAW)

(Homecoming, F16)

(Hale Library, F16)

(Office, LD Maple & Orchid)

(Hale Library, today)

(Anderson Hall, today)

Sept 26, 2016
We welcome Debabani back for a short 3-month visit!

May 26, 2016
We said good bye to Weihong a second (and final?) time after his short stint back in the lab as a postdoctoral fellow. We congratulate him on many things that he has accomplished during his times at K-State and wish him the best in his exciting adventures as a full-time entrepreneur!

February 15, 2016
We welcome Lynn Schrag to the lab! Lynn will work on the new joint project with Dr. Om Prakash's lab that aims to combine simulation and NMR and biophysical experiments to determine how cancer-associated mutations may affect the structure and interaction of p53 transactivation domain.

February 1, 2016
Jianhan's promotion to Full Professor has been approved, starting July 2016. He is now very sure that he would consider picking up new hobbies as promised back in 2012.

November 18, 2015
Our joint project with Drs. Zolkiewski and Prakash has been funded by NIGMS through a 5-year competitive R01 grant! The project aims to develop multi-scale enhanced sampling techniques for IDPs and to combine simulation with experiment to determine how the structure and interactions of p53 transactivation domain may be affected by post-translational modifications and cancer-associated mutations.

August 25, 2015
We welcome Pavithra Natarajan to the lab as a rotation graduate student!

August 18, 2015
We received a Bridging Grant from K-INBRE to support work on p53 transactivation domain. This grant will allow Weihong to return to Manhattan to continue his development of the MSES method. Welcome back, Weihong!

July 28, 2015
Congratulations to Xiaorong and Alex for having their first papers from K-State accepted by Biophysical Journal. Their work combine structural analysis and atomisitc simulation to demonstrate that the BH3-only protein binding interface of anti-apoptotic protein Bcl-xL is highly dynamic and poised to adopt alternative conformations in response to ligand binding.

June 08, 2015
We welcome in-coming K-State freshman Samantha Gameros to the lab! Samantha will work jointly with Prof. Davis to understand how plants regulate boric acid uptake.

May 18, 2015
Congratulations to Michael for receiving admision with full scholarship (!) to his dream law school! Best of luck with your next adventure, Michael!

May 15, 2015
Congratulations to Kuo Hao for having his first paper at K-State accepted by JCC, which is titled "Multiscale Enhanced Sampling of Intrinsically Disordered Protein Conformations"! (JCC)

May 5, 2015
Congratulations to Xiaorong for passing her PhD preliminary exam!

March 25, 2015
Our work on examining the modulation of the disordered conformational ensembles of the p53 Transactivation Domain (TAD) by cancer-associated mutations has been accepted by PLoS Comput Biol. (PLoS)

August 18, 2014
Our joint project with Dr. Jeremy Schmit's lab in Physics has been funded by NIGMS through a 5-year competitive R01 grant! The project aims to develop a multi-scale approach that integrates theory and simulation to understand the mechanism and kinetics of amyloid growth.

August 15, 2014
We welcome Xiaorong Liu to the group! Xiaorong received her B.S. in Applied Chemistry and Master in Chemical Biology from Wuhan University. She has also spent two years in Delaware (with Sandeep Patel) before transfering to K-State.

July 25, 2014
Arianna concluded her successful SUROP summer project with a presentation titled "Protein interactions in cell apoptosis" at the SUROP final event.

(Arianna accepting her SUROP certificate from Dean Shanklin)

July 07, 2014
Congratulations to Weihong for successful defense of his PhD dissertation titled "Multi-Scale Simulations Of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins And Development Of Enhanced Sampling Techniques"!

(Alex and Weihong Graduation Party at Jianhan's house; Click above for more photos)

June 17, 2014
Congratulations to Michael for receiving a $1000 Undergraduate Research Scholarship from the College of Arts and Sciences!

June 17, 2014
Congratulations to Alex for successful defense of his master thesis on "Understanding amyloid fibril growth through theory and simulation"!

May 03, 2014
Congratulations to Debabani on winning a very prestigious Ramalingaswami Re-entry Fellowship from the Department of Biotechnology in India. The followship will provide Rs. 32.5 lakhs research support over five years.

April 23, 2014
We welcome Arianna Vessal, who is joining us during the summer as a participant of the K-State Summer Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (SUROP). Arianna is currently a sophomore in Biochemistry at Virginia Tech.

April 4, 2014
Congratulations to Michael Mohan for receiving a Cancer Research Award from the Johnson Center for Basic Cancer Research.

(Eleanor Deibler (L) & Jan Woodyard present the VFW Post 1786 Award to Michael Mohan at the Award Banquet)

April 2, 2014
We received an Innovative Research Award from the Johnson Center for Basic Cancer Research to study the mechanism for facile binding of BH3-only proteins to the pro-survival protein Bcl-w.

March 25, 2014
Congratulations to Weihong for winning the 2013 Graduate Research Award, the highest recognition the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics offers to graduate students who have achieved an outstanding level of research excellence.

February 03, 2014
We welcome Kuo Hao (Bruce) Lee and Zhiguang Jia to the lab! Dr. Lee is from Taiwan and earned his PhD in Physics from University of Idaho (with F. Marty Ytreberg) in 2012. Dr. Jia is from Beijing and earned his PhD in Biochemistry from University of Queensland (with Alan Mark) in 2013.

(Welcome/Chinese New Year celebration at Jianhan's house)

January 28, 2014
Warm congratulations to Weihong for getting his paper on a very nice multi-scale enhanced sampling (MSES) method accepted by JCTC as a Letter. The method addresses one of the key limitations in the popular temperature replica exchange (T-RE) sampling technique for simulating large-scale conformational transitions such as protein folding. The basic idea is to couple efficient topology-based coarse-grained models with all-atom ones to enhance the sampling of atomistic protein energy landscape. The bias from the coupling is removed by Hamiltonian replica exchange, thus allowing one to benefit simultaneously from faster transitions of coarse-grained modeling and accuracy of atomistic force fields.

(all replicas in MSES sample similar and complete conformational space, while replicas in traditional T-RE are trapped in various major states)

November 6, 2013
The group got together for a farewell lunch with Debabani. We greatly appreciate the six productive years that Debabani has dedicated to our research projects and congratulate her on the many accomplishments that she has achieved with us.

Later that night around 3AM, as Debabani and her husband were finishing up packing, Debabani heard from India UGC-Faculty Exchange Programme that she has been offered an Assistant Professor position! She will be able to select from a long list of universities for her placement, including two in her home town, Kolkata! Our warmest congratulations to Debabani!

October 30, 2013
Congratulations to Debabani for winning a prestigious Senior Research Associateship from India. The fellowship will allow Debabani to remain semi-independent while competing for a permanent faculty position.

October 20, 2013
We discovered during a group party that Alex and Michael are both talented singers.

(Alex and Michael singing "Yesterday Once More" with Allen and Debabani looking on)

October 1, 2013
Congratulations to Alex for receiving early admission to KU Medical School! While we believe that scientists are more "noble" than doctors and that purple wildcat is more elegant than blue jayhawk, we are very happy that he is now one step closer to his dream!

August 31, 2013
Alex is a proud member of the University Marching Band this year. His hard work is helping our beloved Wildcats win games week in, week out!

June 5-6, 2013
For four years in a row, our lab contributes the Girls Researching Our World (GROW) Summer Workshop. This year, Alex, Debabani and Weihong taught "How proteins fold" to dozens of girls in the 6th-8th grades in two sessions.

June 1, 2013
We welcome Michael Mohan as an NSF-funded Summer Undergraduate Researcher! Michael will attempt a complete transformation into a computational biophysicist in 10 weeks.

April 16, 2013
Congratulations to Weihong for having his first methodology paper on replica exchange sampling accepted by JCTC.

Mar 28, 2013
Congratulations to Weihong for receiving a competitive Summer Research Fellowship from the Johnson Cancer Center again this year!

Feb 21, 2013
Our collaborative project on developing software infrastructure for advanced analyses of structural data will be funded by NSF. The total budget of the project is $1.1M from NSF and about £1.3M from UK EPSRC. Project website: CCP-SAS.

Feb 11, 2013
Jianhan was elected together with Ben Schuler as co-Chairs of the 2014 Biophysical Society IDP Subgroup Symposium to be held in San Fransico in Feb 2014.

Dec 28, 2012
Congratulations to Chester for getting his master research titled "Potential Conformational Heterogeneity of p53 bound to S100B(betabeta)" accepted for publication in Journal of Molecular Biology.

Oct 20, 2012
We welcome Alex Beugelsdijk to the group. Alex graduated with a B.Sc. in civil and environmental engineering from UIUC and is currently a first-year master student.

May 1, 2012
Debabani's work on how long-range electrostatics might facilitate coupled binding and folding of IDPs was accepted by JMB. This is a collaborative work with Richard Kriwacki's group at St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital.

April 28, 2012
Jianhan's invited review titled "Towards the physical basis of how intrinsic disorder mediates protein function" was accepted by Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics.

April 19, 2012
Congratulations to Chester for successfully defending his Master thesis, which is titled "Potential Conformational Heterogeneity of the p53/S100B complex". Chester will join Dr. Richt's lab in the College of Veterinary Medicine to pursue his long-time dream of a career in animal disease research.

March 30, 2012
Congratulations to Weihong for receiving a competitive Graduate Student Summer Stipend Award from the Johnson Center for Basic Cancer Research.

March 30, 2012
Congratulations to Weihong and Debabani for receiving travel awards from the Johnson Center for Basic Cancer Research.

Jan 23, 2012
Jianhan's tenure application was officially approved. He will be promoted to Associate Professor starting from July 1st, 2012. He claimed that he would now consider picking up new hobbies, even though there is no physical evidence of that happening yet.

Nov 30, 2011
Congratulations to Weihong and Debabani for getting their paper on atomistic simulation of NCBD/ACTR accepted by PLoS Computational Biology!

Nov 15, 2011
Congratulations to Debabani and Weihong for making the front cover of 2012 IDP themed issue of Mol. BioSyst.

July 25, 2011
Jian's paper on modeling of a synthetic channel-forming peptide (1130) has just been accepted by BBA - Biomembranes. Congratulations!

July 17, 2011
We received a $700,000 NSF MRI to expand our shared Beocat cluster!

June 30, 2011
After some delay, our paper on the Notch NRR activation has been finally accepted, to PLoS ONE. This paper resulted from a collaborative project with Dr. Zolkiewska. It is also a curious example where genuine predictions from simple molecular modeling proved to be correct, based on independent experimental studies published while the paper was still under review.

June 03, 2011
Congratulations to Weihong for passing his PhD Preliminary Exam! Also congratulations to Weihong for getting his first paper accepted by Molecular Biosystems (even though only as a second author)! Keep up the good work!

April 16, 2011
K-State Open House! We made tofu, extracted DNA from strawberry, displayed Manducas, presented the ongoing research programs, and showcased how much fun biochemistry is! Check out more photos here.

April 15, 2011
Jianhan received the HP Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in Computational Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. The Award will be presented in the ACS Fall National Meeting in Denver.

April 1, 2011
This is no April Fools Joke. Our proposal for a session on intrinsically disordered proteins has been accepted by the organizers of the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB). The meeting will take place in Jan 3-7, 2012 in the Big Island of Hawaii. A Call for Papers and Posters can be found at: http://psb.stanford.edu/cfp-idp/index.html.

March 4-9, 2011
The group attended the Annual Biophysical Society Meeting in Baltimore. Weihong, Debabani and Jian presented their works on replica exchange sampling, synergistic folding of IDPs and synthetic ion channels, respectively. They all received Travel Awards from the Johnson Cancer Center for attending this exciting conference.

December 30, 2010
Our paper titled "Intrinsic Disorder Mediates the Diverse Cell Cycle Regulatory Functions of the Cyclin-dependent Kinase Inhibitor, p21Cip1" was just accepted by Nature Chemical Biology! This is a joint work with the Kriwacki lab in St Jude Children's Research Hospital.

December 15, 2010
We discussed key challenges and recent advances in physics-based modeling of intrinsically disordered proteins in a review as part of the Special Issue "Advances in Molecular Recognition" of the International Journal of Molecular Sciences. (MDPI)

November 30, 2010
Our first paper on topology-based modeling of IDPs is accepted by PROTEINS. Congratulations, Debabani! (PROTEINS)

October 28, 2010
The group participated the Protein Folding and Dynamics Mini-Symposium as part of the 45th Midwest Regional ACS meeting in Wichita, KS. Jianhan and Jian presented works on coarse-grained modeling of IDPs and membrane proteins.

August 8, 2010
We welcome Dr. Timothy H. Click, who is joining the lab as a postdoctoral fellow from George Kaminski's lab at Worcester Polytechnic University. Tim received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Oklahoma in 2007.

August, 2010
We celebrated our newest and cutest member, Alice R. Chen, At birth, Alice weighted 3.26 kg and was 49.5 cm long.

July 11-16, 2010
Debabani attended the first GRC on Intrinsically Disordered Proteins in Davison College and presented her work on electrostatics in recognition of IDPs. The meeting obviously was a lot fun!

May 10, 2010
Jianhan received a Faculty Scholar Award from Kansas INBRE!

March 15, 2010
Our first paper on structural characterization of novel synthetic channel-forming peptides using a combination of NMR, biophysical characterization and computer modeling is finally accepted by PROTEINS.

March 10, 2010
We successfully renewed the R01 support from NIH NIGMS (PI: Tomich) on the collaborative project on novel synthetic channel-forming peptides with the Tomich Lab.

March 2, 2010
Our work on implicit solvent and intrinsically disordered proteins will be supported by a five-year CAREER award from NSF! (KSU News Release))

Feb 19-22, 2010
Debabani, Jianhan and Weihong attended the 54th Biophysical Society Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA. Congratulations to Debabani for winning Travel Awards from the IDP subgroup and Johnson Cancer Center, respectively. Here is some photographic evidence of how Debabani and Weihong took advantage of the conference to absorb exciting new knowledge.

November 16, 2009
K-State Collegian published a news piece on our shared Beocat cluster.

November 7, 2009
The whole group attended the 2009 Kansas Physical Chemistry Symposium. Debabani and Jian presented their posters.

November 1, 2009
We thank the Terry C. Johnson Center for Basic Cancer Research for another generous Innovative Research Award. Also congratulations to Melissa for receiving a Cancer Research Award and to Debabani for receiving a postdoctoral travel award from the Cancer Center.

August 4-7, 2009
Jianhan participated as one of the Instructors in the 2009 MMTSB/CTBP Summer Workshop in San Diego. The workshop was attended by about 30 graduate and postdoctoral researchers. Jianhan lectured on CHARMM analysis, implicit solvent methodology, and replica exchange simulation technique.

July 14, 2009
We welcome Weihong Zhang to the lab. Weihong received his B.Sc. in Bioengineering from Beijing University of Chemical Technology and will be a first-year graduate student in the Biochemistry Graduate Program at K-State.

May 21-26, 2009
Jianhan attended the Wakonse Conference on College Teaching as a K-State Wakonse Fellow. A refreshing break from research! (KSU K-Statement News)

May 12, 2009
Debabani's paper on structural interpretation of PRE-derived distances was accepted by JMB. (PubMed)

April, 2009
We recently expanded our shared Beocat cluster to over 1000 computational cores! It is the largest in Kansas.

Feb 28-Mar 04, 2009
Ahlam, Debabanni and Jianhan presented at Biophysical Society 53rd Annual Meeting in Boston, MA.

Feb 18, 2009
Debabani's paper in simulation of the disordered states of KID was accepted by JACS. (PubMed)

Feb 5, 2009
After much delay, Dr. Jian Gao finally arrived to join us at KSU! Dr. Gao received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 2005 from Institute of Process Engineering (IPE), Chinese Academy of Sciences. Prior to joining the lab, Dr. Gao was an Assistant Professor in the State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Complex System at IPE. Dr. Gao will work on coarse-grained modeling of membrane peptides.

Jan 22, 2009
Our first paper on IDPs titled "Intrinsically Disordered p53 Extreme C-Terminus Binds to S100B(ββ) through “Fly-Casting”" is accepted as a Communication to JACS. (PubMed)

June 1, 2008
We received a seed grant from KSU NIH COBRE on Epithelial Function to work on coarse-grained modeling of coupled peptide folding, assembly and membrane insertion.

Dec, 2007
We celebrate our latest member, Allen M. Chen. At birth, he measured 50 cm and weighted 3.15 kg.

Nov 10, 2007
After slight delay due to visa issues, Dr. Debabani Ganguly finally arrives. Welcome, Debabani!

Nov 2, 2007
Congratulations to Asma for winning a Cancer Research Award from the Terry C. Johnson Center for Basic Cancer Research.

Oct 17, 2007
We received an Innovative Research Award from the Terry C. Johnson Center for Basic Cancer Research.

August 31, 2007
After wasting a good afternoon/evening, Chen Lab website launched.

August 13, 2007
Dr. Ahlam Al-Rawi joined the lab as a Research Assistant Professor. In collaboration with Professor Tomich's group, Dr. Al-Rawi will work on a range of projects related to modeling of channel forming peptides and peptide adhesives.

August 08, 2007
Chen Lab opened (literally) in the Department of Biochemistry, Kansas State University.