Zaida (Zan) Luthey-Schulten
Contact Information
University of Illinois
A544 CLSL, Box 19-6
600 South Mathews Avenue
Urbana, IL 61801
Biography
Professor Schulten received a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Southern California in 1969, a M.S. in Chemistry from Harvard University in 1972, and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 1975. From 1975 to 1980 she was a Research Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, and from 1980 to 1985 a Research Fellow in the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Technical University of Munich.
Research Interests
- Determining the rules of life for a minimal bacteria cell
- GPU-based simulations of stochastic/deterministic processes in bacterial and eukaryal cells at biologically relevant length, time, and concentration scales
- computational studies of biomolecular energy landscapes to explore the evolution of structure, folding and function; statistical methods of protein folding - thermodynamics and kinetics; design of optimized energy functions for protein structure prediction; structural genomics of metabolic pathways.
Research Description
Research: From Molecules to Cells - Whole Cell Simulations of Bacterial and Eukaryal Organisms, Rules of Life for a Minimal Cell, Energy Landscapes of Biological Molecules, Exploring the Evolution of Structure, Function & Folding
Lattice Microbes software for simulating hybrid stochastic-deterministic dynamics of cellular processes
Essential networks of a minimal cell
Origins of life, Evolution of translation, Physical bioinformatics
VMD/Multiple Alignment: Evolutionary Analysis Tool
Prediction of protein structure and function with QR profiles
Docking with steered molecular dynamics (SMD)
Protein folding: hybrid molecular dynamics
Distinctions / Awards
- Murchison-Mallory Professor of Chemistry 2019
- Fellow, Biophysical Society 2019
- Fellow, Advanced Studies Institute, LMU Munich 2014
- Fellow, American Physical Society, 2000
- Fellow, Advanced Studies Institute, Hebrew University, Israel, 1998