University of Pennsylvania

With 12 schools located on one compact, urban campus, The University of Pennsylvania or Penn is uniquely positioned for interdisciplinary teaching and research that helps advance the world. The School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) is a world-class research institution that deeply embraces the Penn Integrates Knowledge principle of the Penn Compact. In the spirit of our founder, Benjamin Franklin, the research mission of Penn Engineering is not only to have the highest scholarly standards within disciplines, but also to be an international leader in interdisciplinary research across fields.

The Computational Molecular Systems Biology Laboratory lab utilizes Multiscale Modeling and High-Performance Computing to provide atomic and molecular level characterization of complex biomolecular systems and formulate quantitatively accurate microscopic models for predicting the interactions of various therapeutic agents with innate biochemical signaling mechanisms. We employ several computational algorithms ranging from techniques to treat electronic structure, molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo simulations, stochastic kinetic equations, and complex systems analyses in conjunction with the theoretical formalisms of statistical and quantum mechanics, and high performance computing in massively parallel architectures. One of the grand challenges in the understanding of cancer progression is to find mechanistic links between genomic alterations and the hall marks of cancers such as increased proliferation and survival, aggressive invasion and metastasis, evasion of cell death, and increased metabolism. This challenge is also of quintessential clinical importance because patient outcome to therapy is known to depend on genetic alterations in individual patients. Under WP6: Cancer Models and Hypermodel Design, our laboratory will undertake multiscale cancer modeling for building quantitative models at multiple length and time-scales in characterizing the underlying complexity in cancer signaling at the molecular, cellular, and tissue length-scales.