Dr. Pengyu Ren, a biomedical engineering assistant professor, received a five-year, $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop software that will improve the process of identifying the most effective chemical structures for new drugs. Ren will develop tools for identifying better drugs to treat arthritis, cancer, and other diseases by improving the understanding of how well a potential drug recognizes a protein target in the human body. He will then be able to make these predictions about drug candidates based on computer modeling and simulations of the physical forces acting between a potential drug and its target protein.
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About UT's Cockrell School of Engineering:
The University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering ranks among the top six public engineering schools in the United States. With the nation's fourth highest number of faculty elected members of the National Academy of Engineering, the School's more than 7,000 students gain exposure to the nation's finest engineering practitioners. Appropriately, the School's logo, an embellished checkmark used by the first UT engineering dean to denote high quality student work, is the nation's oldest quality symbol. The School maintains a Web site at http://www.engr.utexas.edu