Lillian Chong and Angela Gronenborn, both professors in the Department of Chemistry at the Dietrich School, and their joint graduate student, Darian Yang, received a 2025 HPCwire Editors' Choice Award for Best Use of HPC in Life Sciences.
Their award-winning study, published in PNAS, utilized Fluorine-19 nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (19F NMR) and atomistic simulations to reveal how a subtle twist in a key HIV-1 protein may facilitate the virus's entry into a host cell’s nuclear pore, thus initiating infection. Their promising results demonstrated that high-performance simulations using weighted ensemble path sampling, when paired with 19F NMR, can uncover new mechanistic insights for HIV therapeutics or vaccine development.