Ruxandra I Dima

Biography

Ruxandra Dima has an interdisciplinary training in theoretical and computational physics and physical chemistry. She is working in the areas of computational biophysical chemistry and biocheminformatics. After receiving her undergraduate degree from the University of Bucharest, Romania in 1994, she studied at the Pennsylvania State University where she obtained her PhD in 1999. Her thesis was concerned with the determination of mean field free-energy potentials between amino acids in proteins. She then took a postdoctoral appointment with Prof. D. Thirumalai at the Institute for Physical Science and Technology, University of Maryland where she worked on problems related to protein aggregation, allostery, RNA folding and single-molecule biophysics. She joined the Department of Chemistry as an Assistant Professor in the Fall 2006. Since 2012 she is an Associate Professor in Chemistry.

Research Interest

The main areas of research in the Dima group are: 1) multiscale modeling of filamentous biomolecules 2) computational studies of the action of motors involved in cytoskeleton depolymerization 3) design and modeling of bio-inspired materials 4) GPU-based computing We use a combination of molecular simulations, bioinformatics, and theoretical modeling to address the various research problems.