Contact Information
lisa3@illinois.edu
(217) 300-9574
Department of Chemistry
University of Illinois
A544 CLSL, Box 19-6
600 South Mathews Avenue
Urbana, IL 61801
Research Areas
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
Awards and Honors
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
Additional Campus Affiliations
Affiliate, Biological Physics
Professor, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
Professor, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology
Professor, Center for Biophysics and Quantitative Biology
Professor, Physics
Professor, Theoretical and Computational Biophysics
Honors & 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
Recent Publications
Chan, A., Tajkhorshid, E., Luthey-Schulten, Z., & Sener, M. (2025). Modeling Diffusive Motion of Ferredoxin and Plastocyanin on the PSI Domain of Procholorococcus marinus MIT9313. Journal of Physical Chemistry B, 129(1), 52-70. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpcb.4c05001
Wu, T., Thornburg, Z. R., Tan, K., Kenkel, S., Boppart, S. A., Bhargava, R., & Luthey-Schulten, Z. (2025). Visualizing Cell Structures with Minecraft. The Biophysicist, 6(1). Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.35459/tbp.2024.000275
Gilbert, B. R., & Luthey-Schulten, Z. (2024). Replicating Chromosomes in Whole-Cell Models of Bacteria. In Methods in Molecular Biology (pp. 625-653). (Methods in Molecular Biology; Vol. 2819). Humana Press Inc.. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-3930-6_29
Gilbert, B. R., Thornburg, Z. R., Brier, T. A., Stevens, J. A., Grünewald, F., Stone, J. E., Marrink, S. J., & Luthey-Schulten, Z. (2023). Dynamics of chromosome organization in a minimal bacterial cell. Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, 11, Article 1214962. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcell.2023.1214962
Stevens, J. A., Grünewald, F., van Tilburg, P. A. M., König, M., Gilbert, B. R., Brier, T. A., Thornburg, Z. R., Luthey-Schulten, Z., & Marrink, S. J. (2023). Molecular dynamics simulation of an entire cell. Frontiers in Chemistry, 11, Article 1106495. https://doi.org/10.3389/fchem.2023.1106495