Research Interests: Dr. Dunker's research from 1965 until now has centered on protein structure and function, especially as regards to virus capsid structure and assembly. In the late 1980s he became began research on the relationship between amino acid sequence and protein structure, publishing his first paper in this area in 1990. Recently he began collaborations with Zoran Obradovic of the WSU Computer Science Department on the prediction of protein disorder from amino acid sequence.
Charles Kissinger
Research Interests: Dr. Kissinger's research has focused primarily on understanding the structural basis for molecular recognition, including protein-protein, protein-nucleic acid, and protein-ligand interactions. His current work involves the application of x-ray crystallography to structure-based drug design and the development of new methods for crystallographic structure determination.
Eugene ShakhnovichResearch interests:
Since 1982 Dr. Shaknovich's research interests were focused on understanding, on physical grounds, the mechanism of biological structure formation in relation to molecular evolution. One of the areas of great interest to him and his colleagues in the lab is theory of protein folding - understanding basic principles how proteins resolve the Levinthal paradox as well as building on that to develop new techniques for protein structure prediction. Other areas of active research interests include rational drug design, protein evolution/design, synthetic polymeric materials as biomimetics, the morphology and dynamics of complex polymer systems (gels, block-copolymers etc) studies in pattern recognition upon poilymer adsorption and viral inhibition.