Meet Our Team

Louis’s Biography: I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago where he studied Biochemistry and Math, and worked in the lab of Professor Shohei Koide. From there I went to the University of Rochester to obtain my PhD under the supervision of Professor David H. Mathews, where I focused on RNA force fields and recapitulating benchmark experiments in molecular simulations. Since then, I’ve been interested in the applications of molecular simulations to IDPs, their interactions with RNA, Markov State Modeling and other kinetic modeling, and to small molecule binding to folded proteins in both cryptic and conventional pockets. I’ve also been working on a collaboration with Dr. Miro Astore in Dr. Sonya Hanson’s group at the Flatiron Institute and Robert Clark in Professor Syma Khalid’s group at Oxford to study the impact of vitrification on molecular ensembles. I’m just getting started in the Tolbert Lab but intend to continue my focus on comparing simulations to NMR, while also working on new simulation methodology that will allow simulators to include extrinsically known RNA secondary structural information in both coarse and atomistic simulations and models of RNA-protein complexes. I’m also looking forward to trying some of the ideas I have been refining about affinity estimation against thermodynamic ensembles of unliganded systems on the HNRNPA1 system.