The Guidez group
Undergraduate students
- Anh Tran
Anh Tran is a senior at UCD currently majoring in biology and pre-medicine. She is investigating the effects of explicit water molecules, a primary component of human biological systems, on the energy and intensity of the plasmonic absorption of gold nanorods. Gold nanorods are good candidates for cancer therapy due to their biotoxicity and easy tunability of their surface plasmon resonance. A combination of quantum mechanical (QM) and effective fragment potential (EFP) methods are used which give a rigorous yet computationally inexpensive way of determining the absorption spectrum of solvated gold nanorods.
- Hossna Yasini
Hossna is a second year undergraduate student who is majoring in Spanish and minoring in mathematics. Her computational research focus is drug host-guest chemistry. She plans on attending medical school after completing her undergraduate degree. As an avid coffee lover, she enjoys exploring different coffee shops in her free time.
- Dmitri Leenatali
Dmitri LeeNatali is from Denver, Colorado, and is currently obtaining a Bachelor's of Science in Chemistry with the University of Colorado, Denver, pursuing undergraduate research in computational chemistry. Starting in Fall 2020, he intends to continue post-graduate studies in the areas of physical and quantum chemistry.
- Kilinoelani Montgomery
Kilinoelani Montgomery is an undergraduate student from Hawaii. She is currently studying chemistry at the University of Colorado, Denver. Her current project is helping to test a new, combined QM-MM mining minima algorithm for the VeraChem VM2 program. The new algorithm will help improve accuracy when calculating the binding free energy of host-guest systems. Host-guest systems are important in drug design because the encapsulation of a drug in a host molecule can improve solubility and bioavailability of the drug in the body.
- Evan Burger
Former members: Joshua Saffy
