Professor; University of Pittsburgh
Lillian Chong, Ph.D., is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh where her research involves the development and application of molecular simulation approaches to model a variety of biophysical processes. Dr. Chong has pioneered work on enhanced sampling methods, including the weighted ensemble method for simulating rare events such as protein binding, protein switching and chemical reactions. In addition, she has made advances in force fields, specifically the Amber ff15ipq protein force field, including an expansion of this force field (ff15ipq-m) released in 2020 for modeling protein mimetics. Dr. Chong has also developed robust scalable software tools for large-scale simulations, including Weighted Ensemble Simulation Toolkit with Parallelization and Analysis (WESTPA).
Chong’s honors and awards include the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Carnegie Science Emerging Female Scientist Award, Hewlett-Packard Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, Frank M. Goyan Graduate Research Award in Physical Chemistry at UCSF, Burroughs Wellcome Graduate Research Fellowship and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
Dr. Chong earned a bachelor of science degree in chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a doctor of philosophy degree in biophysics from the University of California in San Francisco and completed postdoctoral work at Stanford University in Stanford, California and IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.
Open Science Contributions
Learn more about some of Lillian’s open science contributions: