Sally Ellingson, a doctoral student in the Genome Science and Technology graduate program, has won the American Chemical Society’s very prestigious ACS Chemical Computing Group Research Excellence Award.
Ellingson is one of no more than ten graduate students worldwide who received the award this year. It is given in recognition of the quality and significance of her research in integrating supercomputing technologies with biopharmaceutical research.
Ellingson has been successful in developing efficient programs for screening chemicals for their potential to interact with proteins. Due to the her program’s association with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, she is able to use the Kraken, Jaguar, and Titan supercomputers to bridge supercomputing and biological research with particular importance in drug discovery and chemical/system biology.
The award comes with a travel fellowship to the national American Chemical Society meeting in Indianapolis this fall, a recognition ceremony during the meeting, and a free license of a well-known industrial computational chemistry program.
Ellingson’s work is performed in the UT/ORNL Center for Molecular Biophysics, under the supervision of Jerome Baudry, assistant professor in the Biochemistry and Molecular and Cellular Biology department , and Genome Science and Technology faculty in collaboration with Jeremy Smith, UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair for Molecular Biophysics. Her research is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy.
Ellingson has also recently won the 2013 Science Alliance award and, among many travel fellowships, the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing and Supercomputing Broader Engagement awards several years in a row. She has also co-authored many peer-reviewed publications with her advisor and collaborators.
The award is sponsored by the society’s Computers in Chemistry division in association with the Canadian scientific software company Chemical Computing Group. For more information, visit the ACS website.