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American biophysicist From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rommie E. Amaro is a professor and endowed chair of chemistry and biochemistry and the director of the National Biomedical Computation Resource at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on development of computational methods in biophysics for applications to drug discovery.[1][2]
Rommie E. Amaro | |
---|---|
Born | |
Alma mater | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
Awards | Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, 2010
San Diego 78th District Woman of the Year, 2015 ACS Kavli Emerging Leader in Chemistry National Lecturer, 2016 Corwin Hansch Award, Hansch-Fujita Society, 2016 ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for COVID19, 2020 |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Computational biophysics |
Institutions | University of California, San Diego |
Thesis | Investigating the Structure and Function of IGP Synthase |
Doctoral advisor | Zaida Luthey-Schulten |
Website | amarolab |
Amaro grew up in Chicago and obtained her bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1999. She spent two years as a research engineer at Kraft Foods before returning to UIUC for graduate school; she received a Ph.D. in chemistry in 2005 for work with Zaida Luthey-Schulten on computational biophysics. During her graduate work, she also helped develop National Institutes of Health (NIH) Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics workshops. After graduation she became a postdoctoral fellow with Andrew McCammon at University of California, San Diego on an NIH Kirschstein-National Research Service Award (NRSA) postdoctoral fellowship.[1][3][4]
Amaro joined the faculty at University of California, Irvine in 2009, with partial appointments in the departments of pharmaceutical sciences, computer science, and chemistry. She received an NIH Director's New Innovator Award in 2010 and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2010.[1] She returned to UCSD in 2012 in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. She was the director of UCSD's National Biomedical Computation Resource from 2014-2020.[1][5] She served as co-Director of the Drug Design Data Resource (D3R).[6]
Amaro's work has emphasized the utility of GPU computing for methods development for molecular simulation. She was awarded a research grant by NVIDIA in 2013 to continue development for the CUDA platform.[7][8]
Amaro is also active in public outreach and science communication; a high-school student she co-mentored won the 2013 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology, the 2013 Google Science Fair, and the 2014 Intel Science Talent Search.[9]
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