Principal Investigator
Andrew L Ferguson
Professor of Molecular Engineering and Chemistry
Vice Dean for Education and Outreach
Co-Founder, Evozyne Inc.
Deputy Editor-in-Chief, Molecular Systems Design & Engineering (MSDE)
Chair, AIChE Computational Molecular Science and Engineering Forum (CoMSEF)
Director, CECAM-US-CENTRAL
Contact:
Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering
University of Chicago
5640 South Ellis Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
t: (773) 702-5950
Education:
Ragon Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT, 2010-12 (Arup Chakraborty)
PhD, Princeton, 2005-10 (Thanos Panagiotopoulos, Pablo Debenedetti, Yannis Kevrekidis)
MEng, Imperial College London, 2001-05
Selected Honors and Awards:
Professorial ACMM Chair of Computational Science, University of Amsterdam (2022-23)
Dreyfus Foundation Machine Learning in the Chemical Sciences and Engineering Award (2020)
IChemE Junior Moulton Medal (2018/19)
UIUC College of Engineering Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research (2017)
AIChE CoMSEF Young Investigator Award for Modeling & Simulation (2016)
ACS COMP OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty Award (2015)
National Center for Supercomputing Applications Faculty Fellow (2015-16)
ACS PRF Doctoral New Investigator Award (2014)
NSF CAREER Award (2014)
IChemE North America Young Chemical Engineer of the Year (2013)
Links:
Postdoctoral Researchers
Dr. Siddarth Achar
Postdoctoral Associate, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering
Research Interests:
High-throughput virtual screening and data-driven design of sensitive and selective molecular sensors
Email: sachar@uchicago.edu
Dr. Martin Falk
Postdoctoral Associate, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering
Research Interests:
Ultra-coarse grained molecular simulation of biomolecular systems
Email: falkma@uchicago.edu
Graduate Researchers
Jianming Mao
Graduate Research Assistant, Chemistry
Research Interests:
Molecular modeling and design of MOFs and synthetic cell membranes
Email: mjianming@uchicago.edu
Alex Berlaga
Graduate Research Assistant, Chemistry
Research Interests:
Computational design of secondary and tertiary structured peptoids
Email: berlaga@uchicago.edu
Hugh Yeh (co-advised w/ Jun Huang)
MD-PhD Student, Medical Scientist Training Program
Research Interests:
Deep learning generative models for antibody design
Email: hughy@uchicago.edu
Marcia Luna Ramirez Hincapie
Graduate Research Assistant, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering
Research Interests:
Molecular modeling and engineering of adaptive networks for extreme mechanics
Email: lunaramirez@uchicago.edu
Aniruddha Seal (co-advised w/ Laura Gagliardi)
Graduate Research Assistant, Chemistry
Research Interests:
Multi-scale modeling and enhanced sampling of reaction kinetics in enzymes and heterogeneous catalysts
Email: aniruddhaseal@uchicago.edu
Olabisi Aishat Bello (co-advised w/ Aaron Esser-Kahn)
Graduate Research Assistant, Chemistry
Research Interests:
Data-driven discovery of vaccine adjuvants and immunomodulators
Email: olabisibello@uchicago.edu
Sun Yong Kwon
Graduate Research Assistant, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering
Research Interests:
Data-driven surrogate models of biomolecular dynamics
Email: sunyongkwon@uchicago.edu
Max Gruschka
Graduate Research Assistant, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering
Research Interests:
Computational engineering of responsive DNA functionalized nanoparticles
Email: gruschka@uchicago.edu
Srivarshini Ganesan
Graduate Research Assistant, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering
Research Interests:
Deep generative models for data-driven protein design
Email: srivarshinig@uchicago.edu
Yuhan Wu
Graduate Research Assistant, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering
Research Interests:
Data-driven design of of new dermotological models and therapies
Email: yuhanwu@uchicago.edu
Kailin Guo (co-advised w/ Juan Mendoza)
Graduate Research Assistant, Biophysical Sciences
Research Interests:
Data driven enzyme engineering for therapeutic applications
Email: kailinguo@uchicago.edu
Undergraduate Researchers
Arhaan Gupta-Rastogi
The College, UChicago
Email: arhaan@uchicago.edu
Roger Fan
The College, UChicago
Email: rogerfhx@uchicago.edu
Group Alumni
Postdoctoral Alumni
Dr. Hythem Sidky
Director of Solutions Engineering, Verily
Dr. Brandon Peters
Research Engineer, Intel
Dr. Mingfei Zhao
Assistant Professor, Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Alabama
Dr. Siva Dasetty
Data Scientist, NEXTMOL, Barcelona, Spain
Dr. Armin Shayesteh Zadeh
Data Scientist, City of Hope
Dr. Soumajit Dutta
Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering, IIT Gandhinagar
PhD Alumni
Dr. Andrew W Long
Senior Data Scientist, 3M, Maplewood MN
Prof. Greg R Hart
Assistant Professor, Physics, University of Guam
Prof. Jiang Wang
Assistant Professor of Physics, Guizhou Institute
of Technology
Prof. Ré Mansbach
Associate Professor of Physics, Concordia University
Dr. Bryce A Thurston III
Postdoctoral Associate, Sandia National Lab
Dr. Wei Chen
Data Scientist, Teza Technologies LLC
Dr. Yutao Ma
Risk Engineer, Goldman Sachs Inc.
Dr. Walter Alvarado (co-advised w/ Juan de Pablo)
Junior Scientist, NASA
Dr. Kirill Shmilovich
Machine Learning Engineer, Genentech
Dr. Xinran Lian (co-advised w/ Rama Ranganathan)
Postdoctoral Researcher, Arvind Ramanathan Lab, Argonne National Lab
Dr. Shiqi Chen (co-advised w/ Norbert Scherer)
Postdoctoral Researcher, Jason Green Lab, UMass Boston
Dr. Mike Jones
Postdoctoral Associate, Design Physics Division, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Dr. Max Topel
Postdoctoral Associate, Madhav Mani Lab, Northwestern University
Dr. Nicholas Herringer
Dr. Oliver (Yifeng) Tang
Data Scientist, 3M
Dr. Kate Johnson
Scientist, Computational Biology, Cartography Biosciences
Dr. Nikša Praljak
Machine Learning Researcher, Lila Sciences
Undergraduate Alumni
| Jingtian Hu (MatSE, UIUC) | 2012 – 2013 |
| Yuecheng “Peter” Zhou (MatSE, UIUC) | 2012 – 2014 |
| Shao Mei (MatSE, UIUC) | 2013 – 2014 |
| Alexander Trick (MatSE, UIUC) | 2013 – 2016 |
| Ali Hajimirza (CS, U. Oklahoma) | Summer 2013 |
| Abhijit Pujare (EE/CS, Yale) | Summer 2013 |
| Samuel Kaufman (MatSE, UIUC) | 2014 – 2015 |
| Deepak Mani (MatSE, UIUC) | 2015 – 2017 |
| Bridgette Lafaye (MatSE, UIUC) | 2015 – 2017 |
| Suraj Dhanak (MatSE, UIUC) | Summer 2016 |
| Mohit Gayatri (CBE, UIUC) | 2016 – 2018 |
| Chin-Yu “Chester” Cheng (ECE, UIUC) | 2016 – 2018 |
| Aik Rui Tan (MatSE, UIUC) | 2017 – 2018 |
| Aditi Munshi (CS, Grinnell College) | Summer 2017 |
| Marlo Zorman (Chem, University of Vermont) | Summer 2018 |
| Isabelle Augensen (CS, CMU) | Summer 2018 |
| Olivia Dunne (PME, U. Chicago) | 2018 – 2020 |
| Gillian Shen (Chem, U. Chicago) | 2018 – 2020 |
| Joseph Aulicino (PME, U. Chicago) | 2019 – 2021 |
| Jaycie Mundell (Rock Valley College) | Summer 2019 |
| Xiyi Chen (CS, U. Maryland) | Summer 2019 |
| Yuanbo Zhang (CS, UW Madison) | Summer 2019 |
| Melody Leung (PME, U. Chicago) | 2020 – 2022 |
| Antony Awad (PME, U. Chicago) | Summer 2020 |
| Rohan Kapoor (PME, U. Chicago) | 2021 – 2022 |
| Sebastian Suarez Schmidt (Physics, University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras) | Summer 2021 |
| Milla Venasen (ChemE, University of Texas at San Antonio) | Summer 2021 |
| Brenna Bartholomew (ChemE, University of Virginia) | Summer 2021 |
| Smayan Khanna (PME, U. Chicago) | 2022 – 2024 |
| Junhee Lee (PME, U. Chicago) | 2022 – 2025 |
| Diya Ganhdi (PME, U. Chicago) | 2022 – 2024 |
| Aidan Rambo (Xavier University of Louisiana) | Summer 2023 |
| Jay Shen (Physics and Computer Science, U. Chicago) | 2023 – 2025 |
| Abhiraman Senthilkumar (CS, U. Maryland) | Summer 2024 |
| Srusti Donapati (Biological Science and Data Science, UChicago) | 2024 – 2026 |
| Tommy Walsh (Biology and Computer Science, UChicago) | 2024 – 2026 |
| Marco Piazza (Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Tech) | Summer 2025 |
| Estelle Snider (U. Chicago) | 2025 – 2026 |
| Arhaan Gupta-Rastogi (U. Chicago) | 2025 – present |
| Roger Fan (U. Chicago) | 2025 – present |
| Hannah Parish (Chemistry and Computer Science, U. Chicago) | 2025 – 2026 |
| Khuaja Sediqi (Data Science, UIUC) | Summer 2026 |
| Selina Yao (Computer Science, Math, and Chemistry, Harvey Mudd) | Summer 2026 |
| Byron Jimenez (Chemical Engineering, University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez) | Summer 2026 |
| Igbinosa Nosa Delight (Chemical Engineering, University of Lagos) | Summer 2026 |