Four Hamilton students presented the results of their research at the 251st American Chemical Society (ACS) National Meeting and Exposition held March 12-17 in San Diego. David Dacres ’18, Erin Lewis ’18 and Rich Wenner ’17 gave a joint poster, while Pat Marris ’16 presented his research in the Computers in Chemistry (COMP) poster session. Marta Antoniv ’17, Priti Kharel ’18 and Leah Weaver ’18 also attended the conference. In all, more than 16,000 chemists took part.
Dacres, Lewis and Wenner presented results of their research in “Examination of the complete binding pathways of ligands to H274Y and wild-type neuraminidase via multi-scale sampling and MM/GBSA analysis.” Marris’ poster was titled “Investigation of ligand binding pathways to neuraminidase using MM/GBSA free energy analysis” and included Leah Krause ’14 as a co-author.
In addition, Wenner and Marris were invited to give short oral presentations outlining the motivation and major results of their respective work during the inaugural Undergraduate Workshop in Computational Chemistry.
The students’ research was supervised by Associate Professor of Chemistry Adam Van Wynsberghe whose lab is currently studying how small molecules bind to their large protein targets.
The students also attended a dinner with Frank Pickard ’05, now a post-doctoral researcher at the National Institutes of Health, and Dan Mermelstein ’14, a graduate student in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD). Angela Blum, a post-doctoral researcher at UCSD who will join Hamilton’s chemistry department in the fall, also attended the dinner and talked to the students about post-graduate careers in chemistry.
