Brian Andrews

Brian Andrews received his bachelors degree in physics from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio in 2016 and his Ph.D. in physics from Drexel University in 2023. He is currently the Bucher-Jackson Postdoctoral Fellow working in Professor Asja Radja’s lab. 

Brian’s Ph.D. research focused primarily on the dynamics of amino acid residues of proteins in the unfolded or disordered state. Understanding dynamics of such systems can help us understand the basis for a variety of phenomenon such as protein folding, misfolding, the atomistic mechanism for diseases associated with disordered proteins, and synthetic protein design. The primary tool Brian used to examine these systems is classical Molecular Dynamics. In Professor Radja’s lab, Brian is focused on RNA structure prediction which is a problem analogous to predicting protein structures. However, RNA is much more rigid and do not exhibit conformational polymorphism which can be associated with proteins and other flexible biomolecules. One goal of his work is to utilize available quantum computers to perform searches through conformational space.