Our lab started up fall 2022 in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering department at UC Irvine. We are actively recruiting new graduate students and postdocs and looking for collaborators. Please reach out if you are interested at rhayes1@uci.edu, or apply for our postdoctoral opening at https://recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF08649

Summary

Protein engineering and design has exciting applications in biocatalysis, therapeutics, and nanotechnology. While there are many experimental and computational approaches to protein engineering and design, computational approaches typically suffer from low accuracy. This makes them dependent on high throughput experimental validation and optimization. Therefore, research in the Hayes group focuses on improving the accuracy of computational protein design to enable more efficient use of experimental resources.

Molecular dynamics simulations of the motions of protein macromolecules are the primary tool used in the Hayes group. Scalable alchemical methods allow efficient evaluation of free energies of stability or binding for design targets. The methods being developed in the Hayes group are also used in big pharma for computer-aided drug design and provide trainees a useful background for both academia and industry.

Upcoming projects in the group apply these methods to (1) antibody redesign that repurposes old antibodies to target new antigens and antibody thermostabilization to improve shelf life, respectively, (2) de novo design of new protein structures to demonstrate how improved free energy accuracy translates to more successful designs, and (3) collaboration at UCI on biocatalysis.

See Research for more details.