2024 ACS Philadelphia Section Award: Prof. Ronald M. Levy

THE 2024 PHILADELPHIA SECTION AWARD PRESENTATION:

PROF. RONALD M. LEVY

LOCATION: The Science and Education Research Center (SERC) at 1925 N 12th St, Philadelphia, PA 19122

Reception at 6:15 PM, Science and Education Research Center (SERC) lobby

Lecture at 7:00 PM, SERC 116

(Optional) Dinner at 8:45 PM at Osteria (640 N Broad St, Philadelphia, PA 19130)

The reception and lecture are free and open to the public.

For those who wish to attend dinner with the speaker, please note that meals will be self-sponsored.

Abstract:

My talk will briefly review my lifetime experiences with the "Joy of Science". I will first provide a short overview of my working life as a professional computational chemist and biophysicist. I am a founding member of the group of scientists who developed molecular dynamics simulations of proteins into the powerful technique widely used in biophysics, chemistry, and structural biology that it is today. My research interests are broadly focused on the development and application of computational methods for studying the structure, function, and dynamics of proteins. I will touch on some of my earlier work with molecular dynamics simulations of proteins, and explain what it means to "Explore Protein Landscapes." I will tell two short stories presenting my more recent work as a protein landscape explorer. The first concerns Kinase Family proteins and the evolutionary divergence of Tyrosine Kinases from Serine/Threonine Kinases. The second is focused on the development of drug resistance in Human Immunodeficiency Viruses (HIV).

Biosketch:

Ronald M. Levy is a computational chemist and biophysicist. He is one of the founding members of the group of scientists who developed molecular dynamics simulations of proteins into the powerful technique widely used in biophysics, chemistry, and structural biology that it is today. His research interests are broadly focused on the development and application of computational methods for studying the structure, function, and dynamics of proteins. A consistent theme in Ronald M. Levy’s research is working with experimental collaborators. From his earliest papers in the 1980s on NMR relaxation and protein dynamics with spectroscopists, also including very early papers on the use of molecular dynamics simulations with NMR and X-Ray methods to determine protein structures, through to his present-day collaborations with experimental colleagues on the design of antiviral inhibitors of HIV-1 proteins, Levy has greatly valued the insights he has learned working with experimentalists and the importance of establishing strong ties between computational and experimental perspectives. Using computational statistical mechanics as a framework, he has been a leader in studying solvation effects in chemistry and biophysics. In the 1990s Levy developed methods to separate the statistical thermodynamics of biomolecular hydration into local and non-local components based on inhomogeneous solvation theory; he returned to this problem in 2017 using the tools of classical density functional theory to describe how the displacement of solvent “structure breaking” waters at the interface of protein receptors affects protein-ligand binding. Levy has developed novel approaches to study protein folding and allosteric transitions on long time scales by combining replica exchange simulations with Markov State Models. His current research interests are focused on the development and integration of machine learning statistical energy models of sequence co-variation with structure-based models, to map the evolutionary fitness and conformational free energy landscapes of protein families and viruses. Levy has served on numerous NIH and NSF review panels, including terms as a regular member on the NIH Biophysics, Biomedical Technology, and Computational Biosciences Panel (1992-94); the NIH Macromolecular Structure & Function Panel (2015-21) and chair of the panel (2019-21); NSF Chemical Computation & Theory Panel (1989,91,2000,2014-2016). He served on the Executive Committee of the American Chemical Society, Physical Chemistry Division (1997-2000); and on the Executive Committee of the American Physical Society Division of Computational Physics (2007-2010). Levy served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Chemical Computation and Theory (2004-2019); the Editorial Board of Protein Science (1994-97); and Associate Editor of Protein Science (2011-15). He has co-Organized many Symposia at ACS National Meetings, including “Protein Folding Mechanisms and Physical Chemistry”, Chicago,1993; “Frontiers in Theory in Biophysical Chemistry”, Washington D.C., 2000; “Sequence-Structure-Dynamics?Function Relationships in Proteins”, Atlanta, 2021. Levy served on the Scientific Advisory Board of Schrodinger, Inc. for twenty-five years (1995-2020); code originally developed in his group was integrated into software tools for protein modeling and computational chemistry offered by the company and distributed to hundreds of labs around the world.

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