Professor Sereina Riniker, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, has been awarded this year’s Ewald Wicke Prize by the Ewald Wicke Foundation and the Deutsche Bunsen-Gesellschaft für physikalische Chemie e.V. (DBG, German Bunsen Society for Physical Chemistry). It is awarded to distinguished young scientists up to an age of 35 for outstanding scientific achievements in the area of applied physical chemistry.
The prize, which is endowed with € 2,500, honors her outstanding work in the field of method development for simulations of biological and chemical systems. It was presented at the General Assembly of the German Bunsen Society for Physical Chemistry (Bunsentagung 2015) in Bochum, Germany, on May 14, 2015.
Sereina Riniker was born in Lenzburg, Switzerland, in 1985. She completed her master’s degree in chemistry at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, with a research project at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, in 2008. After an internship in the research department of Givaudan AG, Vernier, Switzerland, and a research stay with Berend Smit at UC Berkeley, CA, USA, she returned to ETH Zurich in 2009 to obtain a Ph.D. in molecular dynamics simulations under the supervision of Wilfred van Gunsteren. From 2012 to 2014, she held a postdoctoral position in cheminformatics under the supervision of Gregory Landrum at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, and Cambridge, MA, USA. She was appointed Assistant Professor of Computational Chemistry at ETH Zurich in 2014.
Among other honors, Riniker received the IBM Research Prize for Computer Modelling and Simulations in Chemistry in 2010.
Professor Riniker’s research focuses on the development of methods and software for classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and cheminformatics, and their application to biological and chemical questions.
Selected Publications
- The key to predicting the stability of protein mutants lies in an accurate description and proper configurational sampling of the folded and denatured states,
Andreas P. Eichenberger, Wilfred F. van Gunsteren, Sereina Riniker, Lukas von Ziegler, Niels Hansen,
Biochim. Biophys. Acta 2015, 1850, 983–995.
DOI: 10.1016/j.bbagen.2014.09.014 - Scents and sense: In silico perspectives on olfactory receptors,
Charleen G. Don, Sereina Riniker,
J. Comput. Chem. 2014, 35, 2279–2287.
DOI: 10.1002/jcc.23757 - Using Information from Historical High-Throughput Screens to Predict Active Compounds,
Sereina Riniker, Yuan Wang, Jeremy L. Jenkins, Gregory A. Landrum,
J. Chem. Inf. Model. 2014, 54, 1880–1891.
DOI: 10.1021/ci500190p - On developing coarse-grained models for biomolecular simulation: a review,
Sereina Riniker, Jane R. Allison, Wilfred F. van Gunsteren,
Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys. 2012, 14, 12423.
DOI: 10.1039/c2cp40934h - New functionalities in the GROMOS biomolecular simulation software,
Anna-Pitschna E. Kunz, Jane R. Allison, Daan P. Geerke, Bruno A. C. Horta, Philippe H. Hünenberger, Sereina Riniker, Nathan Schmid, Wilfred F. van Gunsteren,
J. Comput. Chem. 2012, 33, 340–353.
DOI: 10.1002/jcc.21954 - Definition and testing of the GROMOS force-field versions 54A7 and 54B7,
Nathan Schmid, Andreas P. Eichenberger, Alexandra Choutko, Sereina Riniker, Moritz Winger, Alan E. Mark, Wilfred F. van Gunsteren,
Eur. Biophys. J. 2011, 40, 843–856.
DOI: 10.1007/s00249-011-0700-9
Also of Interest
- 114th General Assembly of the German Bunsen Society for Physical Chemistry (Bunsentagung 2015)
- Homepage of the Ewald Wicke Foundation (in German)
- Homepage of the German Bunsen Society for Physical Chemistry (DBG), Frankfurt am Main, Germany
