Jeremy C. Smith
Jeremy C. Smith holds the first University of Tennessee - Oak Ridge Nation Laboratory Governor's Chair, appointed to UT-ORNL Joint Institute for Biological Sciences. He is Director of the ORNL Center for Molecular Biophysics and a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
Dr. Smith is an internationally renowned molecular biophysicist who combines neutron scattering with high-performance computer simulation to understand the physics of biological molecules. A native of Norwich, England, he led successful interdisciplinary research groups in Biomolecular Simulation at the Centre d'Etudes Nucleaires at Saclay, France (1989-1998) and as Chair of Computational Molecular Biophysics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany (1998-2006). Dr. Smith has performed and directed research in high-performance computer simulation of biological macromolecules, neutron scattering in biology, the physics of proteins, bioenergetics and the analysis of structural change in proteins. He maintains extensive international collaborations and has mentored numerous postdoctoral fellows and junior scientists.
He has published over 220 peer-reviewed scientific articles and is an Honorary Professor of the University of Heidelberg.
Molecular biophysics sits at the junction of biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics and computer science; at ORNL Dr. Smith is positioned among four directorates: biological and environmental sciences, computational sciences, physical sciences and neutron sciences. He was attracted to Oak Ridge both by the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) and by the establishment of the Leadership-Class computing facilities at UT and ORNL, which are becoming home to the fastest open-science supercomputers in the world. SNS has decided to build instruments that will aid in the study of complex biological materials. The Laboratory's supercomputers can be used to perform the large-scale simulations needed to interpret biological neutron experiments. Dr. Smith is also heavily involved in the development of multiscale mathematical techniques for describing biological systems.
Dr. Smith has been involved in designing an instrument based on single-molecule spectroscopy for early cancer detection and in designing AIDS vaccines using computer simulation. He is also a member of the ORNL Bioenergy Science Center, where he performs simulations aiding cellulosic ethanol production. He and his colleagues are also working to understand enzyme reactions and how enzymes use chemical energy to make molecular machines work, such as the proteins in muscle contraction, vision or cancer-cell growth.
email: smithjc@ornl.gov
phone: 865-574-9635
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