School of Physics Spring Colloquium Series-Dr. Aleksei Aksimentiev

Speaker: Dr. Aleksei Aksimentiev

Title: Seeing the unseen using supercomputers

Abstract:  Notwithstanding dramatic advances in experimental characterization of nanoscale systems, some of the nanoscale processes are simply too fast to register by experimental approaches or involve displacements at scales too fine for direct experimental observation. Microscopic simulations have emerged as a kind of a computational microscope that can characterize processes inaccessible to experimental techniques, revealing not only the sequence of events underlying an experimental measurement but also the forces and energies involved. This lecture will use several systems to illustrate the application of high-end all-atom, coarse-grained, and multi-resolution simulations to obtain information inaccessible to experimental approaches. The topics to be covered will include nanopore protein sequencing, viral genome packaging and DNA nanomachines. The lecture will provide a forward-looking perspective on modeling an entire biological cell at all-atom resolution.

Bio: Dr. Aleksei Aksimentiev received his M.Sc. in Physics from the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine, and his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Warsaw, Poland. After a brief postdoctoral training at Mitsui Chemicals, Japan, he joined the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at UIUC as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2005, he joined the faculty of the Physics Department at the University of Illinois, where he is currently Professor of Physics. His research interests include biological and synthetic DNA systems, nanopore sequencing, and molecular mechanisms of viral infection.