TCBG Profile
João Ribeiro received his diploma degree in Bioinformatics in 2009 from the Faculty of Biotechnology, Portuguese Catholic University, and his Ph.D. in Sustainable Chemistry in 2014 from Faculty of Science, Faculty of Pharmacy and Institute of Biomedical Sciences Abel Salazar of University of Porto in association with the Nova Lisboa University, advised by Prof. Maria J. Ramos. During his Bioinformatics degree, he had the opportunity to combine Biology and Biochemistry with software development to produce user-friendly Bioinformatics tools. The pursuit for the integration of Biochemistry with software development followed João to his Ph.D studies, where he developed third-party tools (plugins) for the widely used molecular visualization program VMD, developed by Klaus Schulten's Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group. These plugins aimed to assist non-expert users of computational Chemistry software at different stages of the computer-aided drug design process, such as molecular docking, protein mutagenesis and molecular dynamics simulation analysis. João joined the TCB group in 2014 to employ molecular dynamics simulation to study the cellulose degradation process for biofuel production while keeping the software development always present in his work. He is currently the main developer of the newest VMD plugin to assist MD novice users in the preparation, execution and analysis of MD simulations, QwikMD. This plugin smooths the initial learning curve imposed by the MD programs and allows more advanced users to speed-up tedious structure preparation procedures. | ![]() Joao Ribeiro |
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