Research Computing Scientist

Priyanka (Pri) Prakash joined the Research Computing (RC) Data Analytics Center as a Research Computing Scientist in Jan 2024. She joins us from MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX where she worked as an Institute Research Investigator. Prior to that she was a computational scientist at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research (FNLCR, Frederick, MD). She has MS in organic chemistry, and she completed her PhD in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India (IITK). She has extensively worked in the field of computational biophysics, computer-aided drug design (CADD) and in integrating AI/ML and molecular simulation approaches in CADD. She has published 30+ original peer-reviewed research articles in journals including Cell, PNAS, Biophys J, Scientific Rep, in the field of her domain expertise and served as an inventor on investigational new drug applications and patents. Her domain expertise is drug discovery, cancer biology, computational biophysics and computational chemistry and she has been a user of HPC environment (TACC, XSEDE, Biowulf) for more than a decade. She has served as co-PI on two awarded grants for compute time on NSF-funded ACCESS systems. She has designed and developed innovative computational strategies including workflows/computational pipelines in CADD and computational biophysics/chemistry with tremendous positive impact in academia as well as pharma-oriented industry setups. She is highly experienced in scientific communication and grant-writing and has served as a co-I on an awarded NIH R01.