Alex Covington, senior physics student, won the “Roger M. Wartell, Ph.D., and Stephen E. Brossette, M.D., Ph.D., Award for Multidisciplinary Studies in Biology, Physics, and Mathematics” from the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech. It comes with a $3,000 scholarship and a certificate to be awarded at a ceremony on April 22. Alex won for his tireless efforts on integrating a lightweight version of the molecular dynamics program NAMD into the visualization program VMD. Such a tool would provide numerous benefits for, e.g., structure completion, system building, and education.

Anna, Anthony, JC, Karl, Maksym, and Sunny just returned from attending the 60th Annual Biophysical Society Meeting in LA. It was another successful meeting, with Anna and Sunny giving GREAT talks and the rest of us presenting posters. And now we face another year-long wait before the next BPS in New Orleans 2017.

JC just presented the talk “Bridging the gap between X-ray crystallography and biological insight with MD simulations” at the “Hot Spring Harbor International Symposium” in Fukuoka Japan. He also visited MD master Yuji Sugita, for whom a 100-million-atom simulation is trivial, at the RIKEN Institute in Tokyo.