Sali to deliver UCSF Academic Senate’s 66th Annual Faculty Research Lecture in Basic Science

Andrej Sali, PhD, was selected by the UCSF Academic Senate to give the 66th Annual Faculty Research Lectureship in Basic Science, an honor recognizing his contributions to computational biology and integrative structure modeling.

Sali is a professor at the UCSF School of Pharmacy in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences. He provides leadership for the Protein Data Bank and contributes to the UCSF PhD program in Bioinformatics and the Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI). He previously served as the School of Pharmacy associate dean of research.

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More about Sali

Sali is a computational/theoretical biologist of the highest impact, with a career characterized by creativity, scientific ambition, broad and effective collaboration, and extraordinary productivity. His early impact came through the development and large-scale deployment of comparative modeling (also called homology modeling). His MODELLER program was the first to enable protein modeling on the genome-wide scale. Building on this work, he developed new approaches to predicting function and designing inhibitors/drugs for proteins based on experimental structures and computational models. His work on protein modeling allowed for a deeper understanding of the underlying biology behind cell biology as well as understanding diseases. More recently, and largely the basis for his election to the National Academy of Sciences, he has emerged as the leader of integrative structure modeling.

Sali is among the most impactful UCSF scientists, in part because he and his group have developed a series of widely used software packages (IMP, the Integrative Modeling Platform) for modeling proteins, macromolecular assemblies, and pathways, all of which he has freely distributed to the scientific community, including source code. This suite of scientific software has had an impact commensurate with the UCSF founders of computational structural biology, Tack Kuntz, Peter Kollman, Bob Langridge, and Ken Dill.

About the award

Since 1957, this award has been bestowed on an individual member of the UCSF faculty who has made a distinguished record in basic science. Nominations are made by UCSF faculty, who consider scientific research contributions of their colleagues and submit nominations for this prestigious award to the Academic Senate Committee on Research. Each year, the Committee on Research selects the recipient of this award.

Previous School of Pharmacy faculty recipients of this award include Jim Wells, PhD; Ken Dill, PhD; Edward (Eddie) Leong Way, PhD; and Irwin “Tack” Kuntz, PhD. For a list of all past recipients of the award, visit Faculty Research Lecture Award Basic Science - Past Recipients.