Ruben Meana Paneda, PhD, National Institutes of Health, Staff Scientist

The Department of Chemistry Presents:  Ruben Meana Paneda, PhD, National Institutes of Health, Staff Scientist

State of the art High Performance Computing have been driven the scientific revolution over the last few decades. In this talk I present my personal scientific journey developing new computational methods in areas like theoretical and computational chemistry and electron microscopy. Some of these methods allow to include and quantify the tunneling effect, which is essential to study proton transfer reactions, the most important chemical reaction in chemistry and biology. I will also be presenting a new method for speeding up molecular dynamic simulations for the study of biological bilayers. Finally, I will give an overview of my recent progress creating cutting-edge methods for 3D structure determination based on movies obtained with transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and in specific, algorithms for physiochemical characterization of nanoparticles based on movies obtained with graphene liquid TEM.

BIO

Rubén is a staff scientist in the Center for Structural Biology, Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute which is part of the intramural program of the National Institutes of Health. His research spanning various fields including quantum mechanical dynamics, kinetics, molecular dynamics simulations, photochemistry, biochemistry, nanomaterials, catalysis and electron microscopy. His work currently focus on the development of cutting-edge methods for 3D structure determination based on movies obtained with transmission electron microscopy. Rubén completed his postdoctoral training under Prof. Truhlar at the University of Minnesota and received his Ph.D. in theoretical and computational chemistry from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. He arrived at the NIH in 2016, working first with the NHLBI before moving to NCI in 2023.