Zaida Luthey-Schulten

Last updated
Zaida Luthey-Schulten
Other namesZaida Ann Luthey
Spouse Klaus Schulten
Scientific career
Fields Chemistry, Molecular physics, Computational physics, Biophysics
Institutions University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Website www.chemistry.illinois.edu/faculty/Zaida_Luthey_Schulten.html
External videos
Nuvola apps kaboodle.svg "Simulations of Ribosome Biogenesis on the Whole Cell Level", Zan Luthey-Schulten, NCSAatIllinois
Nuvola apps kaboodle.svg "Towards a Computational Model of a Methane Producing Archaeum", Zan Luthey-Schulten, Institute for Genomic Biology

Zaida Ann "Zan" Luthey-Schulten is the William and Janet Lycan Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [1] [2] She was promoted to professor in 2004. [3] She is also involved with the NASA Astrobiology Institute. [4]

Contents

Luthey-Schulten develops molecular dynamics simulations, focusing on individual molecules and groups of molecules and the cellular processes occurring within them. Models are verified and improved through comparison to experimental data from independent researchers. In 2011, her group simulated the cellular architecture of an entire cell and its surrounding cytoplasm, the first time that such an extensive and complex cellular system had been modeled. The three-dimensional model combined ribosome data and other descriptors of Escherichia coli . Representing the architectural features of the interior of the cell suggested that crowding might significantly affect reactions that occur within the cells. [5] More recent work has focused on the modelling of a methane-producing archaean. [6]

Education

Schulten attended the University of Southern California, receiving a B.S. in chemistry in 1969. She then went to Harvard University, from which she was received an M.S. in chemistry in 1972, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1975. [1] Her advisors were Donald G. M. Anderson and Roy Gerald Gordon. [7] She worked as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, from 1975 to 1980, and at the department of theoretical physics at the Technical University of Munich from 1980 to 1985. [1]

Honors and awards

Schulten is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a fellow of the Advanced Study Institute at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. [8] In 2018, she delivered the Francis D. Carlson Lecture in the Department of Biophysics at Johns Hopkins University. [9]

Related Research Articles

Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics is computer software for molecular dynamics simulation, written using the Charm++ parallel programming model. It is noted for its parallel efficiency and is often used to simulate large systems. It has been developed by the collaboration of the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group (TCB) and the Parallel Programming Laboratory (PPL) at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.

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Visual Molecular Dynamics (VMD) is a molecular modelling and visualization computer program. VMD is developed mainly as a tool to view and analyze the results of molecular dynamics simulations. It also includes tools for working with volumetric data, sequence data, and arbitrary graphics objects. Molecular scenes can be exported to external rendering tools such as POV-Ray, RenderMan, Tachyon, Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), and many others. Users can run their own Tcl and Python scripts within VMD as it includes embedded Tcl and Python interpreters. VMD runs on Unix, Apple Mac macOS, and Microsoft Windows. VMD is available to non-commercial users under a distribution-specific license which permits both use of the program and modification of its source code, at no charge.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 "Zaida (Zan) Luthey-Schulten". Chemistry at Illinois. Retrieved 5 January 2016.
  2. "The Luthey-Schulten Group". University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. School of Chemical Sciences. Retrieved 5 January 2016.
  3. "University of Illinois Board of Trustees, Promotions recommended to be effective at the beginning of the 2004-05 academic year".
  4. "Zaida Luthey-Schulten". NASA Astrobiology Institute. Archived from the original on 19 January 2016. Retrieved 5 January 2016.
  5. "Researchers Make The Leap To Whole-Cell Simulations". Biocompare. March 31, 2011. Retrieved 5 January 2016.
  6. Peterson, Joseph R.; Labhsetwar, Piyush; Ellermeier, Jeremy R.; Kohler, Petra R. A.; Jain, Ankur; Ha, Taekjip; Metcalf, William W.; Luthey-Schulten, Zaida (2014). "Towards a Computational Model of a Methane Producing Archaeum". Archaea. 2014: 898453. doi: 10.1155/2014/898453 . PMC   3960522 . PMID   24729742.
  7. "Zaida A. Luthey-Schulten". Chemistry Tree. Retrieved 5 January 2016.
  8. "Zaida (Zan) Luthey-Schulten". Chemistry at Illinois. Retrieved 7 May 2018.
  9. "Carlson Poster 2018" (PDF). Johns Hopkins University. Retrieved 7 May 2018.