Sissel Banke
Sissel is pursuing a doctoral degree in mathematics and computer science at the University of Southern Denmark. As part of her doctoral program, Sissel is visiting our group for 6 months.
Erika Magdalena Herrera Machado
Erika has an undergraduate degree in mathematics and is currently a graduate student in computer science at the University of Southern Denmark. She is enrolled in the Training Alliance for Computational Systems Chemistry, a European doctoral network program funded by the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions to drive scientific excellence and innovation. As part of her doctoral program, Erika is visiting our group for 6 months.
Philipp Honegger
Philipp has a PhD in chemistry from the University of Vienna. He worked both in synthetic organic chemistry and in computational chemistry. In his PhD thesis he applied molecular dynamics techniques to investigate the behavior of biomolecules in reverse micelles. His work predicted effects that were confirmed experimentally. Philipp also resolved a thorny problem related to the long-range nature of the intermolecular Nuclear Overhauser Effect in NMR measurements. During his work in synthetic chemistry, Philipp recognized the need for representing organic reactivity formally and using computational tools in support of reaction inference. He joins us on a prestigious Schrödinger Fellowship from the Austrian Science Foundation to work on the identification and design of autocatalytic reaction networks in organic chemistry.
Walter Fontana (PI)
Trained as a chemist, mentored in theoretical molecular biology by Peter Schuster (Vienna), educated in evolutionary biology by Leo Buss (Yale), self-taught in computer science and charmed by the social sciences through John Padgett (Chicago), Walter has straddled many divides and taken risks in pursuing a professional trajectory shaped by the desire for a broadly engaging cross-disciplinary environment more than by career safety. He moved from the Santa Fe Institute to Harvard Medical School in September 2004. In seeing the opportunities that quantitative thinking and technology bring to experimental biology, the Fontana Lab pursued a theoretical and an experimental agenda that were deliberately distinct from each other. Having achieved a significant experimental milestone, the lab returned to all-computational and theoretical research in 2017. (Walter's website)