Valerie Welborn
Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Department of Chemistry , Virginia Tech
DNA-scaffolded synthetic enzymes for tunable high performance catalysis
Biography
After completing a broad undergraduate education at ESPCI
ParisTech in France, Dr. Vaissier Welborn specialized in developing
computational techniques to model complex macromolecular systems.
She received her PhD in Physics from the Doctoral Training Center in Theory and
Simulation of Materials at Imperial College London in 2014. Her graduate work
revolved around the quantification of the kinetics of intermolecular charge
transport in dye sensitized solar cells, performed under the supervision of
Prof. Jenny Nelson and Prof. Piers Barnes.
Dr. Vaissier Welborn then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at MIT in Troy van
Voorhis’ research group where she focused on incorporating dynamical,
ensemble-based, factors into electronic structure methods for a more accurate
representation of solvent effects and other environmental factors. This was
followed by a second postdoc at UC Berkeley in Teresa Head-Gordon’s group where
she gained expertise inclassical molecular dynamics simulation of proteins and
supramolecular catalysts with polarizable force fields.
Dr. Vaissier Welborn has since started her independent research program at
Virginia Tech where she has been an assistant professor in the Department of
Chemistry since 2019.
Abstract
Proteins and supramolecular
catalysts with polarizable force fields.