Jay Ponder, Ph.D.

Jay Ponder is Associate Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering at Washington University School of Medicine. Professor Ponder has B.A. degrees in Mathematics and in Chemistry from Wabash College. He obtained a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Harvard University for work under E. J. Corey on natural product synthesis of thromboxane A2 analogs, followed by postdoctoral research on biomolecular modeling at Yale University in the group of Frederic Richards. Work at Yale involved early use of side chain rotamer libraries and development of software to combinatorially repack an existing protein backbone, an idea which has become the centerpiece of many protein design computations. In 1990, Ponder joined the faculty at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. His research group focuses on computational chemistry, including methods for conformational search and derivation of next-generation polarizable energetic models for biomolecular simulation and drug design. A major offshoot of this research has involved development and distribution of the AMOEBA force field and the TINKER molecular modeling software package.