Rommie Amaro

Rommie E. Amaro is an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry and the director of the National Biomedical Computation Resource at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on development of computational methods in biophysics for applications to drug discovery.^[1][2]

Early life and education

Amaro grew up in Chicago and obtained her bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999. She spent two years as a staff scientist at Kraft Foods before returning to UIUC for graduate school; she received a Ph.D. in chemistry in 2005 for work with Zaida Luthey-Schulten on computational biophysics. After graduation she became a postdoctoral fellow with Andrew McCammon at University of California, San Diego.^[1][3]

Academic career

Amaro joined the faculty at University of California, Irvine in 2009, with partial appointments in the departments of pharmaceutical sciences, computer science, and chemistry. She received an NIH Director's New Innovator Award in 2010 and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2010.^[1] She returned to UCSD in 2012 in the department of chemistry and biochemistry and became the director of UCSD's National Biomedical Computation Resource in 2014.^[1][4]

Amaro's work has emphasized the utility of GPU computing for methods development for molecular simulation. She was awarded a research grant by NVIDIA in 2013 to continue development for the CUDA platform.^[5][6]

Amaro is also active in public outreach and science communication; a high-school student she co-mentored won the 2013 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology, the 2013 Google Science Fair, and the 2014 Intel Science Talent Search.^[7]

References