Vincent Voelz is a researcher who specializes in studying the dynamics of biomolecules. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Physics from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and later completed his Ph.D. in Biophysics at the University of California-San Francisco in the laboratory of Ken A. Dill. Voelz conducted postdoctoral research at Stanford University in the laboratory of Vijay Pande, using distributed computing and kinetic network models to understand protein folding. In 2011, he started his own research career at Temple University, focusing on simulation methods for computational molecular design. Voelz’s work has contributed to our knowledge of folding and binding processes and has been published in many scientific papers. He continues to explore new ways to understand complex biological systems.

The Voelz group uses biomolecular simulation and statistical mechanics to study protein folding, ligand binding, and molecular design.  From large numbers of simulation trajectories generated on distributed computing platforms, we construct Markov state models (MSMs) of conformational dynamics, which can be used to efficiently estimate mechanistic information about pathways and rates.  Through these methods and others, we aim to predict and design properties of cyclic peptides and other peptidomimetics. We also develop Bayesian inference approaches to model structural ensembles using a combination of experiment and theory.