Prof. Pande’s joined Stanford's faculty in 1999 and now has appointments in both the School of Humanities & Sciences and the Medical School. In 2000, he founded the
His current research centers on the development and application of novel grid computing simulation techniques to address problems in chemical biology. In particular, he has pioneered novel distributed computing methodology to break fundamental barriers in the simulation of kinetics and thermodynamics of proteins and nucleic acids. As director of the Folding@Home project (http://folding.stanford.edu), Prof. Pande has, for the first time, directly simulated protein folding dynamics with quantitative comparisons with experiment, often considered a “holy grail” of computational biology. His current research also includes novel simulation methods for high precision drug binding affinity calculations, protein design, and synthetic bio-mimetic polymers.
Prof. Pande has won numerous awards, including the Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award from the Protein Society (2006), the MIT Indus Global Technovator’s Award (2004), a Henry and Camile Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award (2003), being named to MIT’s TR100 (2002), and named a Frederick E. Terman Fellow (2002). Prof. Pande is currently an Associate Professor of Chemistry and (by courtesy) of Structural Biology at Stanford University.