Research at a Glance:
Outreach

The molecular graphics front end of this tool, VMD, is already used by many biomedical researchers and promises to become an even more popular software tool in the biomedical community since Schulten's group has just completed a version for PCs that furnishes on low cost graphic cards the functionality and speed reserved previously only for expensive special purpose computers. It will permit professionals and students alike to take advantage of the rapidly growing structural data bases in their daily work and studies.

The Schulten group operates a computational molecular biology laboratory that is unrivaled and is available to collaborating scientists and visitors.

Schulten has been active as a leader in the computational biology community. He founded and directs the NIH Resource for Biomolecular Modelling and Bioinformatics at the U. of Illinois. The Resource includes computer science and theoretical chemistry faculty and develops as well as distributes the modelling software mentioned above. Schulten leads as principle investigator the NSF funded Grand Challenge Group collaborating on computational methods for large scale molecular dynamics simulations on massively parallel machines. This group includes J. Board of Duke, A. Brunger of HHMI at Yale, J. Hermans of UNC, T. Schlick of HHMI at NYU, as well as computer scientists L. Kale and R. Skeel of UIUC [ 63]. Schulten periodically organizes various conferences. Most recently (March 1999), he organized at the NIH campus a conference on "Opportunities in Molecular Biomedicine in the Era of Teraflop Computing". He issued a resulting report outlining key research directions for the next decade of computational biology. On the campus of the U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Schulten organizes since several years a Theoretical Biophysics seminar series with many distinguished lecturers that has transformed his group into an intellectual center of Theoretical and Computational Biology. In the spring 2000 he organises a very popular all campus class Biological Physics 001 that explains to students and faculty the revolutionary advances in modern biomedicine.

Schulten teaches Theoretical Physics and Theoretical Biology classes and is writing on textbooks in quantum mechanics and theoretical biophysics (see "lecture notes"). Schulten is a popular lecturer at national and international conferences; in the year 2000 he will give major invited lectures at 12 international meetings. Schulten has been often invited to teach at summer schools, for example, in April 2000 in Perth, Australia. Some of his lectures are: