Goodbye, Tobias

Goodbye to Tobias Loeff, who was a group member for 10 months as part of an exchange Masters program with the University of Edinburgh. His project was excellent and a paper will be written shortly. Congratulations on your Masters degree and all the best for your PhD in Oxford.


Welcome to Ariel and Egidio

Welcome to Ariel Jones and Egidio Viegas.

Ariel is our latest PhD student. Se completed her undergraduate studies and her Honours degree at The University of Queensland, the latter with a computational chemistry project in the group of A/Prof. Elizabeth Krenske.

Egidio joined as a MSc student. He did his undergraduate studies at Methodist University in North Caroline, USA, and will be primarily supervised by Dr Marcus Giansiracusa.

Welcome to Melbourne and good luck for your projects!







Successful ARC Discovery Project bid

Dr Lars Goerigk is Co-Chief Investigator with Drs Sebastian Furness (University of Queensland, lead investigator) and Chris Ritchie (Monash University) on a successful 2023 Discovery Project funded for four years by the Australian Research Council. International partner investigators are Prof. Robert Prosser (University of Toronto) and Asst. Prof. Stpehane Aloise (University of Lille). Read the summary of this highly interdisciplinary project below:

Proteins perform almost every task that enables the amazing complexity of cellular and whole organism physiology. These molecular machines perform this incredible array of tasks due to their ability to dynamically change shape. For the vast majority of these machines, we can only view a snapshot of the possible shapes they can adopt and can’t monitor how they change from one shape to another, which is critical for their functioning. This project aims to develop and apply a completely new method to visualise dynamic changes in protein shape which is not possible with current techniques. This will allow us to provide a new description and understanding of the function of proteins, which is fundamental to all biology.



Hat-trick for our students at the Melbourne Meeting for Molecular Modellers

Last Friday, the M^4 Meeting (Melbourne Meeting for Molecular Modellers) was held for the first time since 2014. The meeting attracted about 70 participants from universities and research institutes around Melbourne and Geelong and was a great success for some of our students who took home three of the four student prizes. Congratulations to:

  • Dominique Wappett for the best poster prize for her poster “Benchmarking Density Functional Theory for reactions catalysed by metalloenzymes”
  • Amy Hancock for the third-best poster prize for her poster “Do modern TD-DFT methods rise to the challenge of noncovalent excited-state binding?”
  • Zahra Zahir (co-supervised with Prof. Colette Boskovic) for the best oral presentation by an HDR student for her talk “Robust DFT-based strategies for predicting valence tautomeric complexes”

Well done, everyone!


Number of posts found: 127