Ron Elber, Ph.D., Professor, Director of the Computational Biology Service Unit, Cornell University

Ron Elber is on the move. He is a full professor in the Department of Chemistry, University of Texas at Austin, and W.A. "Tex" Moncrief Chair in Computational Life Sciences and Biology in the Institute of Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) as of July 1, 2007. Ron Elber obtained a bachelor's degree in chemistry and physics in 1981 and a Ph.D. theoretical chemistry in 1984 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was a postdoctoral fellow in theoretical biophysics from 1984 to 1987 at Harvard University. Ron was on the chemistry faculty of the University of Illinois (1987-1992) and on the chemistry and biology faculty at Hebrew University (1992-1999). From 1999-2007, he has been on the computer science faculty at Cornell where he was a full professor. Ron's research is in computational biology and bioinformatics. His group is developing novel tools (MOIL) to simulate dynamics of biological macromolecules. His current research focuses on algorithms to extend the time scales of simulations and to study complex processes, such as the kinetics of protein folding. Ron's techniques for path following and enhanced sampling are in wide use and motivated the development of related algorithms. His bioinformatic investigations focus on protein annotation using sequence-to structure matches (LOOPP). He currently investigates the network created by sequence structure relationship in proteins. http://www.cs.cornell.edu/ron/