Shoshana Wodak
VIB-VUB Center for Structural Biology, Belgium
Shoshana J. Wodak, earned her PhD at Columbia University, New York, under the supervision of Cyrus Levinthal, who was developing what were then the first and most powerful computational and graphics tools for modelling proteins and protein interactions. Importing and implementing many of these tools to Belgium and France in the late seventies (with crucial support from CECAM (Centre pour le Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire) in Paris, and EMBO), she developed, in collaboration with Joel Janin, the first docking algorithms for the prediction of protein-protein interactions and one of the first procedures for defining structural domains from the atomic coordinates of proteins. With her team at the Free University of Brussels she then used molecular simulations and bioinformatics approaches to investigate the role of local interactions in stabilizing the native state of proteins, protein structure prediction, protein folding, and fold recognition. Together with her teams at the Free University of Brussels, the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, UK, and at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, they also developed efficient procedures for computational protein design, for simulating protein interactions and conformational changes, and for analyzing protein interactions networks and cellular pathways.
For details of her research and recent publication, please visit HERE.
