Friday, June 26th, 2020: It is a bittersweet announcement that this week was Maggie’s last week in the MacCallum lab as she is moving on to another position at CardiAI. Although she will be greatly missed, we are so excited to see all you will accomplish in the future!
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2020: Congratulations to Tanille for winning one of five Elizabeth Cannon Graduate Scholarship in Entrepreneurial Thinking.
Monday May 25th, 2020: Congratulations to Kari for being awarded a Dean’s Doctoral Scholarship!
Monday April 20th, 2020: We are proud to announce that Ishruna successfully defended her Thesis (Waterfall: An online sequential Monte Carlo Strategy for Conformational Sampling) and graduated from her Master of Science in Biophysical Chemistry. Congratulations! We can’t wait to see the amazing things you do next!
Wednesday, March 11th, 2020: Back in March, Tanille was elected the 2020-2021 Graduate Students’ Association President. She is now the official spokesperson of the GSA and represents the collective voice of nearly 7000 graduate students at the University of Calgary at municipal, provincial and federal levels.
The GSA is pleased to congratulate the elected officials: Tanille Shandro as President; Mary Zhang as VP Student Life; Christine Cao as VP External; Alex Paquette as VP Academic; and Brit Paris as the AVP Labour
The week came to a bittersweet ending as we had a going away party for our lab member, Jess, as she is moving on to a new position at Stanford University. We are so excited for the opportunities coming her way but she will be greatly missed in the MacCallum Lab. Good luck Jess!
Julia and Tanille headed to San Diego, CA over the past week to attend the 64th annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society and present posters on their work with Brain Fatty Acid Binding Protein. They had a wonderful time networking, gaining valuable insight on their own projects as well as learned what their peers are exploring in this field.
At the Peer Beyond Research Symposium poster competition Tanille takes second place! This symposium was unique that it encouraged collaborations and showed presented work from a variety of faculties here at University of Calgary. Keep up the great work Tanille!
Our lab group and many others in the department joined Kit Chapman at the TELUS Spark centre for a Fiver Night where we were able to connect with the community and share our passion for each of our favourite elements! Kit Chapman is a science journalist and wrote the book Superheavy, a book on the discovery of the heaviest elements on our table.
Prof. Sir. J. Fraser Stoddart PhD from Northwestern University and the Recipient of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry gave a lecture series including His Journey to Stockholm, Science Entrepreneurship, and his Nobel prize winning research on molecular machines. Graduate students were able to meet with Sir Stoddart to ask all of their burning questions related to graduate studies and their own scientific curiosities. Sir Stoddart left an inspiring impression on our students.
Thousands of Calgarians and hundreds of young aspiring scientists joined our lab group at the Calgary Public library during science literacy week for a spectacular Beakerhead event! We put on several interactive and engaging reactions to spark the community’s curiosity to pursue their own scientific endeavors.
Congratulations to Tanille Shandro for winning the 2019 Biological Students Association Undergraduate Research Award! This is the only Undergraduate Research award presented by the BSA and is a wonderful way to end her Undergraduate degree. We are happy that Tanille will be staying in the MacCallum group for her Graduate Studies.
Few members of our group were able to attend the 2019 Biophysical Society Annual meeting in Baltimore! The meeting is 5 full days of talks, posters and industry showcases with an interdisciplinary focus on life, physical, and computational sciences. We made a big splash with two talks given by myself, and our PhD student, Kari Gaalswyk on integrative modeling approaches. Our two MSc students both presented posters on their work as well! We gained lots of valuable insight on our own projects and we were able to learn first hand of new emerging research in our field!
Apart from science we were able to explore the diverse city of Baltimore and visited Edgar Allen Poe’s home and the National Aquarium!
Congratulations to Tanille Shandro who won one of only three poster awards at the University of Calgary Undergrad Research Symposium. Great job!
Our latest work “High accuracy protein structures from minimal sparse paramagnetic solid-state NMR restraints” has be posted as a pre-print on bioRXiv.
We applied our MELD methodology to solid-state NMR experiments using paramagnetic relaxation enhancements and show that accurate structures can be modelled with even a small amount of experimental data.
It was a great pleasure to visit Arizona State University last weekend to celebrate Ken Dill’s 70th birthday. Thanks very much to fellow Dill group alumni Steve Presse, Banu Ozkan, and Kings Ghosh for organizing.
Ken was my postdoctoral advisor and is an amazing mentor. I owe much of who I am and what I’ve been able to accomplish to Ken. He taught me a great deal, not only about science, but also about people and institutions. Ken’s approach is positive and focused around building consensus and finding mutual benefit, and I try my best to emulate him in this regard.
It was also striking just how many amazing scientists have come through Ken’s lab. It is quite an impressive group that I’m proud to be a part of, with dozens of successful researchers with careers in both academia and industry. Also noteworthy was the overall quality of the presentations. Ken owes much of his success to the ability to communicate complex ideas to broad audiences, and it’s clear that this skill has transferred to those who have worked with him.
The event was a great chance to catch up with old friends and make some new ones. We sometimes forget how important community is to all of us. Science is portrayed as cold and objective, but in practice it’s truly a human endeavour—we depend on each other to advance knowledge. Ken reflected on his own scientific upbringing and how it takes a village to raise a scientist. He also stressed the responsibility that we bear to be defenders of knowledge and of institutions, like universities, in the age of alternative facts.
There is also a special Festschrift issue of J. Phys. Chem. B in Ken’s honour.
Oh, and the weather was pretty good.
Faris Fizal, a high school student who has been working with us since January, was interviewed by the CBC. Faris is preparing for the Sanofi Biogenius Canada competition, where his project involves molecular simulations of natural and engineered variants of hemoglobin to be understand their stability under shear stress, with the ultimate goal to produce synthetic blood replacements.
Our new cluster, GLaDOS, is coming together.
The system features:
We decided to do a team building exercise at one of the escape rooms at The Locked Room. Someone with a sense of humour thought it would be fun for us to try the hardest room. We did not escape, but it was a ton of fun.
We just posted a new pre-print to bioRxiv on the optimization of Hamiltonian replica exchange simulations. The abstract is below:
Replica exchange is a widely used sampling strategy in molecular simulation. While a variety of methods exist for optimizing temperature replica exchange, less is known about how to optimize more general Hamiltonian replica exchange simulations. We present an algorithm for the on-line optimization of both temperature and Hamiltonian replica exchange simulations that draws on techniques from the optimization of deep neural networks in machine learning. We optimize a heuristic-based objective function capturing the efficiency of replica exchange. Our approach is general, and has several desirable properties, including: (1) it makes few assumptions about the system of interest; (2) optimization occurs on-line wihout the requirement of pre-simulation; and (3) it readily generalizes to systems where there are multiple control parameters per replica. We explore some general properties of the algorithm on a simple harmonic oscillator system, and demonstrate its effectiveness on a more complex data-guided protein folding simulation.
Feedback is welcome.
