PhD
K.H. Lee Distinguished Professor
School of Pharmacy
UNC-Chapel Hill
Molecular Therapeutics
Area of Interest
My research focuses on computational drug discovery, cheminformatics, computational toxicology, structural bioinformatics and health informatics with the emphasis on methodology development and experimentally testable hypothesis generation. My research has had a major impact in the area of computational drug discovery where we employ cheminformatics approaches such as Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship (QSAR) modeling to predict various types of biological activity, including anticancer activity, for new chemicals. In recent years, we have expanded our research interest towards biomedical text mining and health informatics. For the past two years, I have served as PI for the NIH funded biomedical data reasoning project and coPI for the biomedical data translator project that targeted the development and analysis of biomedical knowledge graphs. One of the practical deliverable of these projects is the ROBOKOP portal that allows the creation and analysis of clinical outcomes pathways for known drugs. we have ported some of our major software tools and models to the publicly available Chembench portal developed in our laboratory (chembench.mml.unc.edu) as well as developed a biomedical text mining portal Chemotext (chemotext.mml.unc.edu).
Awards and Honors
- Recipient of 1993 Chairman’s Award, NC Section of the American Chemical Society; Assoc. Chair, International Cheminformatics and QSAR Society
- Recipient of 1992 Tripos Inc. Academic User of the Year Award
- Graduated summa cum laude, Moscow State University, 1982
