The Academic Senate is pleased to announce the selection of Andrej Sali, PhD, as recipient of the Sixty Sixth Annual Faculty Research Lectureship in Basic Science for his work on computational biology and integrative structure modeling. The lecture, titled “All You Need is Harmony: Modeling for Biology” will take place on Tuesday, April 16, 2024, from 3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. in Byers Auditorium at Mission Bay Campus. 

Dr. Sali is a computational/theoretical biologist of the highest impact, with a career characterized by creativity, scientific ambition, broad and effective collaboration, and extraordinary productivity. His early impact came through the development and large-scale deployment of comparative modeling (also called homology modeling). Dr. Sali’s MODELLER program was the first to enable protein modeling on the genome-wide scale. Building on this work, he developed new approaches to predicting function and designing inhibitors/drugs for proteins based on experimental structures and computational models. Dr. Sali’s work on protein modeling allowed for a deeper understanding of the underlying biology behind cell biology as well as understanding diseases. More recently, and largely the basis for Dr. Sali’s election to the National Academy of Sciences, he has emerged as the leader of integrative structure modeling.

Dr. Sali is among the most impactful UCSF scientists. One reason he has had such a large impact is that he and his group have developed a series of widely used software packages (IMP, the Integrative Modeling Platform) for modeling proteins, macromolecular assemblies, and pathways, all of which he has freely distributed to the scientific community, including source code. This suite of scientific software has had an impact commensurate with the UCSF founders of computational structural biology, Tack Kuntz, Peter Kollman, Bob Langridge, and Ken Dill.

Dr. Sali is Professor at the UCSF School of Pharmacy in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences. In addition, Dr. Sali provides leadership for the Protein Data Bank and contributes to the UCSF PhD program in Bioinformatics and the Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI).