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Prof. Pande is currently the Director of the Program in Biophysics, Director of the Folding@home Distributed Computing project, and a Professor of Chemistry and (by courtesy) of Structural Biology and of Computer Science at Stanford University. His current research centers on the development and application of novel cloud computing simulation techniques to address problems in chemical biology. In particular, he has pioneered novel distributed computing methodology to break fundamental barriers in the simulation of kinetics and thermodynamics of proteins and nucleic acids. As director of the Folding@home project (http://folding.stanford.edu), Prof. Pande has, for the first time, directly simulated protein folding dynamics with quantitative comparisons with experiment, often considered a “holy grail” of computational biology. His current research also includes novel computational methods for drug design, especially in the areas of protein misfolding and related diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease.

Prof. Pande received a BA in Physics from Princeton University in 1992. There, he was first introduced to biophysical questions, especially in his undergraduate thesis research with Prof. Philip Anderson, a Nobel Laureate in physics. Three years later, in 1995, he received his PhD in physics from MIT, studying as a NSF Fellow under Profs. Toyoichi Tanaka and Alexander Grosberg. At MIT, Prof. Pande’s research centered on statistical mechanical models of protein folding and design, suggesting novel ways to design protein sequences to have the desired stability and folding properties. As a Miller Fellow working with Prof. Daniel Rokhsar at UC Berkeley, Prof. Pande extended this methodology to examine atomistic protein models, laying the foundations for his later work at Stanford University.

Prof. Pande has won numerous awards, including the Michael and Kate Bárány Award for Young Investigators from Biophysical Society (2012), Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award, American Chemical Society (2010), Fellow of the American Physical Society (2008), Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award from the Protein Society (2006), the MIT Indus Global Technovator’s Award (2004), a Henry and Camile Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award (2003), being named to MIT’s TR100 (2002), and named a Frederick E. Terman Fellow (2002).