Andrej Sali, PhD
Andrej Sali develops computational methods for determining and modulating structures and functions of protein assemblies. He has a BSc in Chemistry from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a PhD from University of London, where he developed the MODELLER program for comparative modeling of protein structures. He was a Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund fellow at Harvard, studying lattice Monte Carlo models of protein folding. From 1995 to 2002, he was at Rockefeller University. He then moved to UCSF as a Professor of Computational Biology, in the Departments of Bioengineering, Therapeutic Sciences, and Pharm. Chem.; and in California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). Andrej has been Sinsheimer Scholar, Sloan Research Fellow, Hirschl Trust Career Scientist, Zois Awarded Science Ambassador of Slovenia, and elected Fellow of ISCB. He has been editor of Structure since 2002; and a founder of Prospect Genomix and Global Blood Therapeutics.
Integrative Structural Biology
The Sali Lab aims to develop and apply computational methods for integrative determination of the structures and dynamics of macromolecular assemblies, in turn informing the function and evolution of these systems as well as how to modulate them. The broad goal is to contribute to a predictive spatiotemporal model of the cell. This goal is being achieved by a formal integration of experiment, physics, and statistical inference, spanning all relevant size and time scales. Our computational methods are implemented in the open source Integrative Modeling Platform package (IMP) and the resulting models are deposited in the PDB-Dev database. This research enhances the discovery of general principles that underlie all cellular processes, which in turn also facilitates drug discovery.