April 13, 2007
Raed Khashan, a doctoral student at the UNC School of Pharmacy, has won a Chemical Computing Group Excellence Award from the American Chemical Society’s Division of Computers in Chemistry.
Khashan, who is in the School’s Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products, is one of five recipients for the award. He will receive $1,150 and a copy of CCG’s Molecular Operating Environment software with a one-year license. The winners will present their work at the ACS national meeting in Boston on August 21.
Khashan, who obtained his master’s degree in pharmacy at the University of Texas at Austin, entered the PhD program at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2003. He is the fourth student from the School to receive the award. Previous winners include Scott Oloff (who won in 2004), Shuxing Zhang (2004), and Min Shen (2003).
Khashan’s work is in the area of computer-assisted drug discovery. In recent years, researchers have been able to use X-rays and nuclear magnetic resonance to produce three-dimensional structures of proteins that are drug targets. To develop an effective drug, researchers need to find molecules that fit precisely in the active sites of the target proteins. A key to that process is having a computational method that can accurately score the most promising drug candidates and identify them from large libraries of chemicals.
“Raed has developed a novel scoring method that significantly outperforms current commercial software, which is why the selection committee gave him the award,” said Alex Tropsha, PhD, Khashan’s research adviser.
“This is a highly original line of research, and Raed has been working on these difficult and challenging research topics very much independently. Raed has a strong background both in computer science and computational molecular modeling. He has a rather curious mind, which makes him interested both in theoretical aspects of modeling and its applications toward real problems in chemistry and biology.”
The CCG is an international software company dedicated to the life sciences, and the Molecular Operating Environment is the company’s platform for drug discovery and design. The ACS is a self-governed individual membership organization with more than 160,000 members at all degree levels and in all fields of chemistry. The organization aims to provide opportunities for peer interaction and career development.
The Excellence Award was created in 2000 through a partnership between CCG and the ACS’s Division of Computers in Chemistry (COMP) as a means to stimulate graduate student participation in COMP activities—such as symposia and poster sessions—at ACS national meetings. Eligible candidates for the award are graduate students of the Americas in good standing who present work within the COMP program, either in oral or poster format. The award is given out twice each year, in the spring and fall. The winners are chosen on the basis of the quality and significance of the research to be presented, as well as the strength of the other materials submitted for consideration, including a letter of support from the student’s research adviser.
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