Chengxi (Ace) Yang

Graduate Research Student

Ace received his B.S. in bioinformatics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen) in 2022. He worked with Prof. Bao-ting Zhu on inflammatory drug design and with Prof. Gui-juan Cheng on nickel-catalyzed hydrocyanation. He also worked with Prof. Yun-Dong Wu on palladium/norbornene catalysis at Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School. He joined UChicago and the Voth group in Fall 2022.

Dovydas Vasiliauskas

Graduate Student
Department of Chemistry
The University of Chicago
vasiliauskas@uchicago.edu

Hezhou Zhang

Graduate Research Student

Hezhou received his B.S. in chemistry at UCLA in 2022. He worked with Prof. Daniel Neuhauser on stochastic realization of exciton coupling for molecular aggregates. He joined UChicago and the Voth group in Fall 2022.

Jong Ho Choi

Graduate Research Student

Jong Ho Choi joined the group in 2022. He received B.S. in chemistry (in 2020) and M.S. in chemistry (in 2022) at Sogang University, Seoul, Korea. He studied polymer systems with various methods including CG MD simulations, AA MD simulations, ab initio MD simulations, and machine learning with Prof. Bong June Sung. In Voth’s group, he is studying bio-molecules.

Kuntal Ghosh

Graduate Research Student

I hail from the city of Kolkata, India. I did my BSc (Honours) in Chemistry from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata in 2019 and completed my MSc in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2021. During my Bachelor’s, I worked with Prof. Pinaki Chaudhury (University of Calcutta) and Dr Rahul Sharma (St. Xavier’s College) on the development of stochastic optimisation techniques to locate saddle points and to trace out isomerisation pathways in ionic clusters. For my Master’s project, I worked with Prof. Nisanth N Nair on the application of the Multiple Time Step algorithm to speed up electrostatic calculations in QM/MM simulations. In the Voth group, I will be working on the development of coarse-grained models. 

A detailed look into my work can be found on my Google Scholar page. 

Sheng (Thomas) Qu

Graduate Research Student

Tamsuk Paul 

Graduate Research Student

I was born and raised in the city of Kolkata (erstwhile Calcutta) and completed my B.Sc in Chemistry from the University of Calcutta. Then I went on to pursue my M.Sc at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IITKgp) where I worked with Dr. Sabyashachi Mishra on my M.Sc thesis project when I learned the classical Molecular Dynamics simulations. Currently, I am interested in Theoretical Biophysics which I am going to pursue in the Voth lab.

Weizhi Xue

Graduate Student
Department of Chemistry
The University of Chicago
weizhixue@uchicago.edu

Ayan Majumder

I am from Kolkata, India. I completed my BSc at Ramakrishna Mission Residential College, Narendrapur, and my MSc at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. I completed my PhD at Boston University working with John Straub. In the Straub group, I studied protein homodimerization in membrane bilayers. I joined the Voth group in September 2024, where I am working on developing multiscale models to study biological complexes.

Curt Waltmann

CCTCh Fellow

Curt received his B.S. degree in Materials Engineering from Iowa State University in 2018 where he studied the interactions of hydrocarbon coated nanoparticles with Alex Travesset. He completed his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University in 2023 in the lab of Monica Olvera. His work focused on the assembly and mechanical properties of complex macromolecular systems including proteins and/or polymers. In the Voth group, Curt hopes to use multi-scale coarse graining techniques to study kinetic processes in the HIV life cycle.

Debaleen Biswas

Research Professional and Manager

Debaleen Biswas, born in Krishnanagar, West Bengal, India in 1989, is a passionate researcher. He earned his B.Sc. (Hons.) in Physics from Abhedananda Mahavidyalaya, under The University of Burdwan in 2009. Furthering his education, he completed his M.Sc. in Physics at the University of Calcutta in 2011 and obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from the same institution in 2017. Dr. Biswas’s research journey began at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, focusing on semiconductor device fabrication and simulations. He received a doctoral research fellowship from the Department of Atomic Energy, Govt. of India. He later joined Nagoya Institute of Technology (NITech), Japan in 2018 as a Postdoctoral Researcher, specializing in GaN-based high-power and high-frequency device applications. He has published extensively and holds patents for his innovative creations. Beyond research activities, Dr. Biswas contributed as a visiting faculty member at Techno India University, Kolkata.

Kristina Hermen

Kristina received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from St. Norbert College in 2019. During this period, she was an NSF-REU fellow at the University of Utah where she worked with Prof. Valeria Molinero to study the role of the structure-directing agent on zeolite nucleation. She subsequently completed her PhD in 2024 at the University of Washington where she worked with Prof. Sotiris Xantheas. Her graduate research focused on the utility of the many-body expansion in understanding the nature of noncovalent interactions, developing accurate many-body potentials, and accelerating benchmark lattice energy calculations. In July 2024, Kristina joined the Voth group as a postdoctoral scholar. Here she will develop multi-scale coarse graining models to study complex biomolecular systems.

Mandira Dutta

Postdoctoral Scholar

I completed my Ph.D. at Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), Kolkata, India. In my Ph.D., the primary focus was on the theoretical and computational investigations of molecular motor dynamics and their effects on different disease-related mutations. I obtained my Ph.D. degree in February 2020 and joined as a postdoctoral research scholar in the Voth group.

In the Voth group, I will study viral protein dynamics specially SARS-CoV2 spike, membrane, and nucleocapsid proteins, their interactions, and conformational changes of spike protein during receptor binding. I will implement both all-atom and coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations and enhance sampling techniques. I will also be involved in the development of CG models using the bottom-up approach and multiscale theory methods in this context.

Sahithya Sridharan Iyer

Postdoctoral Scholar

Sahithya received her bachelor’s and master’s degree in Chemistry from Pondicherry University, India. Following which she joined Prof. Anand Srivastava’s group in Molecular Biophysics Unit at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 2015. In graduate school, she studied various aspects of nanoscale heterogeneities on laterally phase-separated bio-membranes. To this end she used Molecular Dynamics and Monte Carlo simulation techniques and compared the observations made to experiments. In 2021, she joined as a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Huan-Xiang Zhou’s group in the University of Illinois at Chicago. In the postdoctoral stint in Zhou group, Sahithya studied the viscoelastic properties of biomolecular condensates by modelling droplet fusion and performing non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. In October 2022, Sahithya joined the Voth group. Here she will be employing multi-scale coarse graining methods to study complex biomolecular systems.

Puja Banerjee

Postdoctoral Scholar

Background: 

Puja earned her Bachelor’s degree from Jadavpur University, India in 2012, and a Master’s degree from IIT Kanpur, India in 2014, both in Chemistry. In the same year, she joined Prof. Biman Bagchi’s group in IISc, India where she has worked on protein association/dissociation processes using biased and unbiased molecular dynamics simulations, dynamics of electrolyte solutions with polyatomic ions, and the nucleation processes of polymorphic solids. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Chemistry in February 2020 and joined the Voth group in September 2020.

Research Interests: 

Puja is interested in using multi-scale methods to understand the mechanisms of large-scale viral processes and the collective behavior of macromolecules involved in viral replication and infectivity. She is currently working on the protein-protein self-assembly processes as well as protein-membrane interactions using both all-atom and coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations in the systems of HIV-1 and SARS-CoV-2.

Siwei Luo

Postdoctoral Scholar

Siwei received his B.S. degree in Chemistry from Wuhan University in 2017, where he studied the mechanism of oxygen reduction reaction in fuel cells with Prof. Shengli Chen. He was enrolled in a chemistry doctorate program under the supervision of Prof. Mark Thachuk at the University of British Columbia. His Ph.D. work focuses on developing coarse-grained models for fluid systems using projection operator theory and distribution function theory. After earning his doctoral degree at the end of 2022, he worked with Prof. Alex Wang at the University of British Columbia on optimizing the basis used in grid-free DFT while continuing the study of coarse-grained models. He joined the Voth group as a postdoc at the beginning of 2024. Siwei will work on modelling a multi-phase electron transfer process and coarse-grained dynamics of molecular systems.