Virtual Screening for Chemists

Ishika Saha is a PhD candidate in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at UCLA. She completed her undergraduate studies in organic chemistry at the University of Durham, England, where she received an integrated Master of Chemistry (MChem) degree. At UCLA, her thesis studies in Professor Patrick G. Harran's lab involve the synthesis and characterization of composite peptidyl macrocycles. She has also co-written software to simulate their methodology on a large scale and is now screening in silico libraries with the goal of identifying new peptidomimetic ligands for signaling proteins.

Dr. Patrick G. Harran graduated from Skidmore College in New York. He completed his PhD in organic chemistry from Yale University in 1995 and was an NIH sponsored postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. In 1997, Harran joined the faculty at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He was promoted to Full Professor and named the Mar Nell and F. Andrew Bell Distinguished Chair in Biochemistry in 2005. In 2008, he accepted the inaugural Donald J. & Jane M. Cram Chair in Organic Chemistry at UCLA. Harran’s lab studies synthetic methods to create new small molecule structures, and ways those compounds can drive biological research.