Computational biophysics

Our research

Understanding the function of biomolecular structures holds the key to a wide range applications from biotechnology to pharmacology and medicine, and in our computational biophysics group this is our main focus.

Physicists have a lot to contribute to this area which requires modeling of biological systems at different time scales using quantum, classical and stochastic dynamics. Judicious modeling that links vastly different space-time domains (e.g. nano and micro domains) is essential in achieving useful answers.

Therefore, our focus is to develop hierarchical schemes that will allow description of biomolecular processes with the available computational resources.  The methods involved - from most phenomenological to fundamental - are:

• Low resolution methods (e.g. Brownian dynamics) are employed in model studies to make contact with experimental phenomena that occur at long time scales and large space dimensions. 
  

• Microscopic methods (e.g. molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo) are used to justify the phenomenological models and derive the parameters employed in them.

• Ab initio methods (e.g. density functional theory, Car-Parinello MD) are used to derive/justify the force fields in MD simulations. 

Most of the projects require substantial computational power and we make use of the supercomputers in Sydney (AC3) and Canberra (APAC).

Our people

• Associate Profesor Serdar Kuyucak
• Dr Turgut Bastug
• Mr Jeffry Setiadi
• Ms Sabina Yasmin
• Mr Daniel Golestan
• Daniela Rivas
• Guangsi Meng