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Charles Brooks

Professor, Chemistry and Biophysics, College of Literature, Science and the Arts

Medicinal Chemistry, College of Pharmacy; Applied Physics, LSA; Bioinformatics, College of Medicine; Program in Chemical Biology, LSI; Macromolecular Science and Engineering, College of Engineering

Statistical mechanics, computational modeling and machine learning applied to biological problems

Our work is focused on the applications of statistical mechanics to the modeling and simulation of processes in biology, ranging from small molecule discovery for therapeutics and tool molecules, novel free energy methods for drug and protein design, biocatalyst discovery and design, and protein and RNA folding. Data science and machine learning, more specifically, are integral to the development and application areas under study in our group. Applications integrating data science and AI approaches include recent efforts to discover and design protein molecules to perform highly specific chemical transformations (biocatalysts). Other areas include enhanced sampling of chemical space in free energy calculations.