Jeffrey Skolnick

Jeffrey Skolnick is an American computational biologist. He is currently a Georgia Institute of Technology School of Biology Professor, the Director of the Center for the Study of Systems Biology, the Mary and Maisie Gibson Chair, the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Computational Systems Biology, the Director of the Integrative BioSystems Institute, and was previously the Scientific Advisor at Intellimedix.

He has focused on the development of computational algorithms and their application to proteomes for the prediction of protein structure and function, the prediction of small molecule ligand-protein interactions with applications to drug discovery, the prediction of off-target uses of existing drugs, and the exploration of the interplay between protein physics and evolution in determining protein structure and function. He is a pioneer in the field of protein structure prediction, including the development of CABS and CAS methods of lattice based conformation sampling, and the algorithms Touchstone II and TASSER.

Skolnick is most known for demonstrating that the number of ligand binding pockets in proteins is quite small, thereby justifying the likelihood that large scale drug repurposing will work. This combined with the ability to use predicted as well as experimental structures in virtual ligand screening at higher accuracy and precision than existing approaches will enable FDA approved drugs with novel mechanisms of action to be identified computationally with a high likelihood of experimental success.

He is also known for his unique teaching methodology and interactive pedagogy to simplify the comprehension of complex concepts in computational chemistry. Provided by Wikipedia