News

2022 News Archive

December 2022: Prateek Bansal won the SCS Science Image Challenge in the Cover Art Category for his work on the cover of ACS central science. Congratulations!

December 2022: Our group is part of The Center for Predictive Materials Design (PreMaDe) supported by Army research Office. Find more information about the center here.

December 2022: Arnav Paul, graduate student in Chemistry joined our group! He will work on ML guided simulations of membrane transporters. Welcome Arnav!

September 2022: Professor Diwakar Shukla named a Pivot Fellow by Simons Foundation! You can find more details here.

August 2022: Jiming Chen, graduate student in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering defended her thesis on “Molecular Perspectives on Protein-Ligand Selectivity in Host and Parasitic Plants”. Congratulations Jiming!

August 2022: Our group received funding NIH R21 grant from National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to work on machine learning guided design of HIV latency modulators!

July 2022: Matthew Chan, graduate student in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering defended his thesis on “Molecular Mechanisms of Neurotransmitter Transport in Neurons”. Congratulations Matt!

June 2022: Dr. Yiyang Lu, PhD in Bioengineering from University of Illinois joined our group as a postdoctoral fellow! He will work on high-thought experiments for characterizing protein sequence, structure and function relationships.

May 2022: Sarah Lindley, first year Bioengineering student joined our group! She did undergraduate degree in Biology from Arizona State University. She will work on high-throughput experiments for design of agrochemicals for drought resistance. Welcome Sarah!

March 2022: Our group received funding from Herman Frasch Foundation for Chemical Research for machine learning guided design of agrochemicals for inducing drought resistance in plants!

January 2022: Lingyun Xu, first year Bioengineering student joined our group! She did undergraduate degree in Physics from Nanjing University. She will work on high-thought experiments for characterizing protein sequence, structure and function relationships. Welcome Lingyun!

2021 News Archive

December 2021: Tanner J. Dean, first year Biophysics student joined our group! He did undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from Virigina Tech. Welcome Tanner!

December 2021: Dr. Rabindranath (Rabi) Paul joined our group as a postdoctoral fellow. He completed PhD in Chemistry from Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. Welcome Rabi!

October 2021: Song Yin, first year ChBE student joined our group! Song did his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Tianjin University. Welcome Song to the group!

September 2021: Shukla group received funding from National Institutes of Health via the Maximizing Investigator Research Award (MIRA) to work on high-throughput experiments and simulations to characterize membrane protein function.

August 2021: Prof. Shukla received the 2021 The Journal of Physical Chemistry (JPC) and PHYS Division Lectureship Award. Read more about the award on the ACS axial blog post.

May 2021: Jiangyan Feng, Phd #5 from our group defended her thesis. She joined Eli Lilly & Co. as a research scientist in San Diego. Congratulations!

May 2021: Shukla group returns to work in person and we start using our newly renovated office space in 201 RAL. Thanks to ChBE@Illinois for renovating our office space during pandemic.

January 2021: In our recent work in Nature Communications, we investigate How human gut microbiome members are able to acquire energy from glycans undegradable by the host? Soumajit Dutta from our group answers this question from a structural perspective! Read more here.

January 2021: Diego Kleiman, first year Biophysics graduate student joined our group! He did undergraduate degree in Physics from New York University. Welcome Diego!

2020 News Archive

December 2020: Graduate Student Jesse Horne, first year ChBE student joined our group! He did undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from University of Alabama. Welcome Jesse!

December 2020: Graduate Student Matthew Chan received fellowship from the NSF Molecular Science Software Institute to extend his work on Transfer learning based methods for predicting effect of protein variants.

November 2020: Balaji Selvam, Post-doctoral fellow in our group will join Gossamer Bio, San Diego as a computational scientist. All the best!

October 2020: Graduate Student Hsin-Lan (Nicole) Chiang, first year ChBE student joined our group! She did undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from UCLA. Welcome Nicole!

August 2020: Graduate student, Jiangyan Feng won the Chemical Computing Group Excellence Award for Graduate students from the Division of Computers in Chemistry, American Chemical Society. Congratulations!

July 2020: Graduate student, Chuankai Zhao successfully defended his thesis. He will join Bloomberg (NYC) as a research software engineer. Congratulations!

May 2020: Graduate student, Shriyaa Mittal successfully defended her thesis. She will join as a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University. Congratulations!

April 2020: Prof. Shukla received the C3.AI Digital Transformation Institute Research Award to work on modeling of interaction between human ACE2 receptor and SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein.

April 2020: Prof. Shukla received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research from the College of Engineering, University of Illinois.

January 2020: Our recent work on “How evolution shapes the conformational free energy landscapes of proteins?” is highlighted in the Emerging Young Investigator issue of MSD&E journal!

January 2020: Jiming Chen and Prof. Diwakar Shukla are included in the List of Excellent Teachers for teaching Chemical Reaction Engineering and Process Control & Dynamics in Fall 2019 respectively.

2019 NEWS Archive

December 2019: Prof. Shukla is selected as the CAS fellow by the Center for Advance Study at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Read the news here!

October 2019: Prof. Shukla gave an invited talk at the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Lehigh University.

October 2019: Prateek Bansal (First year ChBE student) joined our research group! Welcome Prateek!

August 2019: Zahra Shamsi defended her thesis on “Evolution of Protein Structure and Function” and she is headed to Google for her next position. Congratulations Dr. Shamsi !

July 2019: Prof. Shukla and Matthew Chan participated in the summer school on rare events organized at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and taught one day course on Markov State Models !

June 2019: Congratulations to Matthew Chan for being included in the List of Excellent TA’s for teaching ChBE 221 in Spring 2019!

June 2019: Shriyaa Mittal is included in the List of Excellent Teachers for her work as a Teaching Assistant in Spring 2019. Congratulations!

June 2019: Prof. Shukla receives the Excellence in Teaching Award from the School of Chemical Sciences. Read the news here.

June 2019: Aniket Deb from Jadavpur University joined our group for summer internship as the Khorana Scholar supported by the Indo-US Science & Technology Forum!

May 2019: Alexander S. Moffett successfully defended his thesis on “Computational investigation of early events in plant growth signaling”. Congratulations!

April 2019: Chuankai Zhao received the Outstanding Student Research Award at the GLCACS 23rd Annual Conference 2019. Congratulations!

April 2019: Chuankai Zhao and Balaji Selvam received the first and third prize respectively for their poster presentation at the Science & Spirits poster competition organized by Department of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences. Congratulations!

March 2019: Prof. Shukla gave two invited talks at the ACS Spring meeting in Orlando highlighting our research on membrane transporters and plant hormone receptors!

January 2019: Soumajit Dutta passed the Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering PhD qualifying exam with flying colors! Congratulations Soumajit!

2018 NEWS Archive

November 2018: Prof. Shukla received the NSF Early Career Award from the Division of Molecular & Cellular Biosciences at National Science Foundation! Read the news here.

October 2018: Jiangyan Feng won the first prize in the ChBE graduate student research symposium. Congratulations Jiangyan!

October 2018: Chuankai Zhao received the Hanratty travel award from Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering department to attend ACS Fall meeting. Congratulations Chuankai!

November 2018: Shriyaa Mittal received the graduate student travel award from the Biophysical Society to attend their 2019 annual meeting at Baltimore. Congratulations Shriyaa!

October 2018: Shriyaa Mittal passed the Biophysics Preliminary Exam with flying colors. Congratulations Shriyaa!

August 2018: Matthew Chan and Jiming Chen passed the ChBE oral qualifying exam. Congratulations Matt and Jiming!

July 2018: Chuankai Zhao passed the ChBE preliminary examination with flying colors. Congratulations Chuankai!

May 2018: Prof. Shukla received the OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in Computational Chemistry from the ACS Division of Computers in Chemistry. Read the full news here.

May 2018: Jiming Chen was selected to receive the NIH Chemistry-Biology Interface Training fellowship. Congratulations Jiming!

April 2018: Kevin Cheng received the NSF graduate fellowship to work on understanding mechanism of sugar transport in plants. Congratulations Kevin!

April 2018: Qihua Chen won the best presentation award at the Chemical Engineering Undergraduate Research Symposium. Way to go!

March 2018: Our recent paper on G-Protein Coupled Receptors now features on the cover of Angewandte Chemie International Edition. Check out the cover here.

March 2018: Shriyaa Mittal, CSE Fellow 2017-18 presented her research work in the CSE seminar series. Check out the video here !

February 2018: Check out our recent paper in Angewandte Chemie International Edition on “Universality of the Sodium Ion Binding Mechanism in Class A G‐Protein‐Coupled Receptors“. Congratulations Balaji and Zahra!

January 2018: Check out our paper in The Journal of Physical Chemistry by Jiangyan Feng on “Characterizing Conformational Dynamics of Proteins Using Evolutionary Couplings.”

2017 NEWS Archive

December 2017: Our group received the “New Innovator award in Food and Agriculture Research” from the Foundation for food and agriculture research!

December 2017: Check out the news article about our research paper on regulation of plant kinases, “Researchers harness the power of a supercomputer to better understand plant enzymes“.

November 2017: Zahra Shamsi and Prof. Shukla presented several talks and a poster at 2017 AIChE Annual Meeting at Minneapolis. Prof. Shukla also chaired the session on Data Mining and Machine Learning in Molecular Sciences.

October 2017: Check out our recent paper on “Enhanced unbiased sampling of protein dynamics using evolutionary coupling information” in Scientific Reports. Congratulations Zahra and Alex!

October 2017: Shriyaa presented her work on ‘Optimal Probes’ at the Gracehopper Conference in Orlando. Congratulations Shriyaa!

September 2017: Check out Prof. Shukla’s interview about his role as a director for Girls Adventure in Mathematics Engineering and Sciences Camp. Congratulations to the entire GAMES team!

July 2017: Dr. Balaji Selvam wins one of three best poster awards at the Monsanto Research Symposium. Congratulations Balaji!

July 2017: Check our our latest paper in collaboration with Diao group on printable electronics technology published in Nature Communications. Congratulations Diao group and Chuankai!! Here is the link to the news about this article and the article on the nature website.

June 2017: Our group organized the Girls Adventure in Mathematics, Engineering and Sciences Camp for high school girls from across the country.

June 2017: Prof. Shukla feature in the list of excellent Teachers for teaching undergraduate and graduate elective ChBE 478/594 DS.

May 2017: Moeen graduates with an undergraduate degree in ChBE. Congratulations to the second alumni of ShuklaGroup!

May 2017: Shriyaa Mittal is the recipient of the CSE fellowship from the Computational Science and Engineering program at Illinois. Congratulations Shriyaa!

April 2017: Kevin Cheng is the recipient of the prestigious Ford Foundation fellowship from the National Academies of Arts, Sciences and Medicine. Congratulations Kevin!

March 2017: Undergraduate student Qihua Chen was selected as the Blue Waters Intern for the year 2017-18. Congratulations Qihua!

February 2017: Balaji Selvam and Shriyaa Mittal gave oral presentations on their work on membrane transporters at the Annual Biophysical Society meeting.

2016 NEWS Archive

December 2016: Graduate Student Kevin Cheng joins our lab. Welcome Kevin!

November 2016: Prof. Shukla gave a talk at AIChE meeting in San Francisco.

July 2016: Graduate Student Alex Moffet gives a talk at Blue Waters Symposium at Sunriver resort, Oregon.

June 2016: Prof. Shukla features in the list of excellent teachers selected by students for teaching ChBE523, Graduate course on Heat and Mass Transfer.

May 2016: Graduate Student Zahra Shamsi selected for the Widiger Fellowship from the department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Congratulations Zahra!

April 2016: Undergraduate researcher Moeen Meigooni selected for the Illinois Scholars Undergraduate Research Program. Congratulations Moeen!

March 2016: Undergraduate student Zeynep Ali got admission offers from many top graduate programs in Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering. She will be joining the joint Bioengineering program of UCSF and Berkeley in Fall. Congratulations, Zeynep!

March 2016: Prof. Shukla gave an invited lecture on the “Protein Conformational Networks” in the IB502 Biological Networks Course taught by Prof. Amy Marshall-Colon.

March 2016: Prof. Shukla gave a talk in the Molecular Mechanics session at the ACS Annual Meeting, San Diego on “Mechanistic insights into the activation mechanism of cellular signaling proteins”.

January 2016: Prof. Shukla gave a talk in the “Physiology and Molecular Plant Biology” Seminar Series in the Department of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at UIUC.

2015 NEWS Archive

October 2015: Our group visited Booker T. Washington STEM Academy in Champaign to teach kids about protein structure and function. For more information about this exciting activity, read our blog post here.

October 2015: First year ChBE graduate student Chuankai “Kyle” Zhao joins our group. Welcome Kyle!

July 2015: Diwakar gave an invited talk on Brassinosteroid signaling in plants at the FASEB Science Research Conference on Protein Kinases and Protein Phosphorylation (SRC-PKPP).

July 2015: iSEE funds Plants insilico project. Check out the news article here.

June 2015: Check out Diwakar’s interview in the Spring 2015 issue of MassTransfer magazine.

June 2015: Paper titled “A network of molecular switches controls the activation of the two-component response regulator NtrC” published in Nature Communications.

June 2015: Undergraduate students Erik Saathoff and Moeen Meigooni join our group as summer interns. Welcome!

May 2015: Check out our recent Folding@home blog post.

March 2015: Diwakar is now a faculty member in the Center for Biophysics and Computational Biology and an affiliate faculty at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Feb 2015: Diwakar is selected as one of the “Blue Waters Professor” at Illinois, an honor that comes with substantial computing and data resources on the Blue Waters Supercomputer.

Jan 2015: Recent article in Accounts of Chemical Research by Shukla et al. has been selected as an ACS editor’s choice article. The selection of these articles is based on recommendations by the scientific editors of ACS journals from around the world. These articles remain open for all to access and read.

Jan 2015: Diwakar is now an affiliate faculty in the Computational Science & Engineering program at Illinois.

2014 NEWS Archive

Dec 2014: Biophysics graduate student Alexander Moffett joins the group. Welcome Alex !

Dec 2014: Paper on “Automatic Order Parameters Selection In Markov State Models for Atomistic Understanding of Molecular Dynamics Data” by Sultan et al. accepted for publication in Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation.

Nov 2014: Diwakar chairs two sessions on “Molecular Modeling & Simulations of Complex Molecules” in AIChE meeting at Atlanta. He also gave a talk on “Elucidating Activation Mechanisms of Key Signaling Protein for Selective Drug Design”.

April 2014: Diwakar will join Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in January 2015.

January 2014: Our work highlighted on Nature Chemistry Cover Jan 2014.

Cover of Nature Chemistry Jan 2014 issue can be found here. The paper is also accompanied by a commentary by X. Deupi on the paper on activation of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) in Nature Chemistry. Read Molecular dynamics: A stitch in time. X. Deupi. Nature Chemistry (2013) doi:10.1038/nchem.1832