Dec 18, 2019
We are thrilled to add two new graduate students to the lab! Yumeng Zhang grew up in the city of Lanzhou in the Northwestern region of China and graduated with a B.S. in Chemistry from Wuhan University. Yumeng was involved in various chemical synthesis project during her undergraduate study and is a highly skilled Go player. Qianlan was born in Inner Mongolia and grew up mostly in Beijing. He has a Bachelor of Engineering from Minzu University of China and a Master degree in Pharmacy from Peking University, working on total synthesis of natural products. We look forward to many exciting contributions from Yumeng and Qianlan in the coming years!

Dec 6, 2019
Congratulations to Xiping and Erik for having their first paper at UMass accepted for publication in Journal of Computational Chemistry! This paper reports the implementation of the GBMV2 implicit solvent force field on GPU in OpenMM. This is an important progress that will set the foundation for several important directions we want to pursuit in the next few years.

Nov 5, 2019
Congratulations to Xiaorong for being a co-author on a paper just accepted for publication in Nature! This is a collaborative work with Yao and Lovley labs. They discovered a new device that could harness ambient moister for electricity generation. The computation has helped in deriving a molecular mechanism of how this may work.

Oct 25, 2019
Congratulations to former postdoctoral fellow Kuohao for joining the NIH/NIDA Computational Chemistry and Molecular Biophysics Unit as a Staff Scientist!

July 25, 2019
Congratulations to Zhiguang to have his work on "Molecular basis of PIP2-dependent regulation of the Ca2+-activated chloride channel TMEM16A" accepted by Nature Commumications! This is also a collabrative efforts with Huanghe Yang's lab at Duke University.

June 28, 2019
We are very pleased to receive the notification that NSF will fund an MRI project led by Jianhan to acquire a dedicated GPU computing cluster for the UMass Institute for Applied Life Sciences!!! (UMass News Release)

March 20, 2019
Congratulations to Zhiguang to have his work on gating of TMEM16F lipid scramblase accepted by Nature Commumications! This is a collabrative efforts with Huanghe Yang's lab at Duke University.

Feb 02, 2019
The group celebrated the Chinese New Year together in Jianhan's house and looked forward to a great Year of Pig!

Dec 19, 2018
The group celebrated a highly successful year 2018 and holidays together! What a great year with so much to be thankful for and to celebrate together! To name a few, Zhiguang & Mahdieh's discovery of hydrophobic gating in BK channels, Azar's new faculty position in the beautiful La Jolla, addition of two bright new graduate students in Erik and Xiping, Xiping's new baby son, a newly minted PhD in Xiaorong, and several new federal grants to support various research projects, Jianhan surviving teaching Stat Mech and then Quantum Mechanics both the first time ever ... We wish everyone the best and look forward to another great year in 2019!

Dec 17, 2018
Our warmest congratulations to Xiaorong for a highly successful defense of her PhD dissertation on "Multi-scale simulations of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins"!

Dec 8, 2018
We are thrilled to add two new graduate students to the lab! Erik Nordquist hails from Idaho. He has a BS from the College of Idaho, majoring in Physics-Mathematics and Chemistry with minors in Computer Science, History, and Philosophy!!. Xiping grew up in Nanchang, China. He has a BS in Chemistry from Nanchang University and a MS from Xiamen University, developing density functional valence bond methods. We look forward to many exciting contributions from Erik and Xiping in the coming years!

Nov 30, 2018
Congratulations to Mahdieh for winning another Best Poster Award, this times at 8th Life Sciences Graduate Student Symposium of UMass!

Oct 20, 2018
Xiping and Mahdieh presented their works on GPU accelerated implicit solvent and gating of BK channels in the 15th Annual North Eastern Structure Symposium. Congratulations to Mahdieh for wining the Best Poster Award!

Aug 28, 2018
Congratulations to Xiaorong Liu for being selected as one of the six speakers of the annual UMass Chemistry ResearchFest and winning the prestigious William E. McEwen Graduate Fellowship!

Aug 24, 2018
We thank NIGMS for a generous Administrative Supplements for Equipment of $140K for acquiring additional GPU computing nodes! It will significantly increase our computing capacity to work on several NIH supported projects!

Aug 22, 2018
Group members, Mahdieh, Xiaorong and Wayne, presented their exciting works at the ACS national meeting in Boston. The crowds were unusually large (not totally kidding)!

Aug 17, 2018
The group went to UMass Berkshire Dinning Common to enjoy the No. 1 Campus Food in the US and say farewell to Mara!

July 18, 2018
Congratulations to Zhiguang and Mahdieh for getting their paper on hydrophobic gating of BK channels accepted by Nature Communications! It is a lot of hard work and their exciting discovery will have great impacts on those who are interested in BK and other ion channels! (UMass News Release)

July 10, 2018
We received a 4-year grant from National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop efficient GPU-accelerated computational techniques and study how proteins may exploit highly flexible structures for function! (UMass News Release)

July 8, 2018
The group celebrated Kuohao's highly productive tenure in the Chen lab at Jianhan's house! Kuohao will move to University of Kentucky to be a Staff Scientist in the College of Pharmacy at the end of July. It was a bittersweet moment and we all wish Kuohao and his family the best!

July 1, 2018
The Journal of Molecular Biology Special Issue on "Intrinsically Disordered Proteins: Structure, Function and Therapeutics", co-edited by Jianhan Chen and Richard Kriwacki, is now available online. The editorial overview can be found here.

June 15, 2018
Our collaborative project with Ned Debold (Kinesiology) and DV (Chemistry) on development of a light-sensitive, high-energy molecule to power muscle function during acute myocardial ischemia and fatigue has been funded by a two-year Innovative Project Award by American Heart Association. (UMass News Release)

April 11, 2018
Congratulations to Katrina for winning the 2018 (Chemistry) Departmental Recognition Awards and Positron Award! Well done, Kat!

April 1, 2018
Our collaborative project with Jianmin Cui (WashU St Louis) and Xiaoqin Zou (Mizzou) on studies of the gating and pore-sensor coupling mechanisms of large current calcium-activated potassium (BK) channels has been funded by NIH/NHLBI through a 4-year R01 grant! (WashU News Release)

April 1, 2018
We welcome Dr. Azar Farjamnia to the lab as a Visiting Researcher!

Feb 21, 2018
Zhiguang presented his discovery of a hydrophobic gate in human BK channels at the Biophysical Society Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

Nov 1, 2017
Congratulations to Xiaorong for publishing her new Hybrid Resolution (HyRes) protein model, which provides semi-quantitative secondary structure propensities together with a qualitative description of long-range nonspecific interactions. This is a result of over two years meticulous and persistent work!

July 1, 2017
We welcome Justin and Katrina to lab as undergraduate researchers! Justin will work on molecular mechanism of chemotaxis (in collaboration with the Thompson lab), and Katrina will work on simulation of tumor suppressor p53.

Mar 1, 2017
Mahdieh Yazdani joined the lab as a graduate student. Mahdieh is originally from Iran and has been at UMass Amherst since 2014. We are glad that Madhieh finds computational biophysics exciting and appreciate her courage of re-inventing herself. Welcome!

Feb 24, 2017
After much ado, our new GPU cluster is finally powering up. It is housed in the beautiful Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) and has 32 4-GPU computing nodes.

Feb 1, 2017
We welcome Dr. Mara Chirocotto to the lab as a postdoctoral fellow. Mara is originally from Italy and received her PhD in Theoretical and Computational Biophysics from University Paris Diderot (Paris VII) in 2017.

Jan 17, 2017
Congratulations to Zhiguang and Alex for getting their paper on "The Levinthal Problem in Amyloid Aggregation: Sampling of a Flat Reaction Space" accepted by JPCB! This is a result of several years' hard work in collaboration with Jeremy Schmit's lab and our first paper on development of multi-scale algorithms for simulating the fibril growth mechanism and kinetics at atomistic details.

Jan 1, 2017
Enjoy and cherish every moment!

(IALS/LSL South)

(A fresh new day in a new year!)

(New England winter magic)

Jan 1, 2017
Our first day officially at University of Massachusetts Amherst! It has been quite a journay, through sunshine and snow.

(Snow storm around Cleveland)	(A beautiful day through Great Plains)
(UMass Central Library)	(UMass sunset)