William Noid Receives Hewlett-Packard Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in Computational Chemistry

William Noid, assistant professor of Chemistry at Penn State, is the recipient of the 2010 American Chemical Society Hewlett-Packard Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in Computational Chemistry given by the American Chemical Society's Division of Computers in Chemistry. The award is given annually to four outstanding tenure-track junior faculty members, with the intent of assisting them in gaining visibility within the computational-chemistry community. The awardees present their research at a national meeting of the American Chemical Society.

Noid uses the theoretical and computational methods of statistical mechanics to answer questions in structural and molecular biology. His group is developing models for characterizing the structure and dynamics of partially unfolded and intrinsically disordered proteins. Recent experimental evidence indicates that these proteins play central roles in vital cellular processes and may also be involved in the development of Alzheimer's disease and other debilitating neurodegenerative diseases. However, these processes evolve on timescales outside the scope of conventional computational models.

Noid's lab has recently proposed a new theory for determining accurate coarse-grained models directly from experimental data. Coarse-grained models are mechanical models of molecular systems in which the fundamental interacting particles represent groups of atoms. Consequently, these models can investigate slow processes that occur on timescales that are inaccessible to more conventional models. Ultimately, these coarse-grained models will provide insight into the role of disordered proteins in both cellular processes and pathology.

Noid was honored by Cornell University in 2003 with the Howard Neal Wachter Memorial award for outstanding graduate research in theoretical/physical chemistry, in 2005 with a Tunis Wentink Prize as an outstanding chemistry graduate of Cornell University, and in 2006 with a National Institutes of Health Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award. He was a National Science Foundation fellow in nonlinear dynamics and complex systems from 2000 to 2002 and a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow from 2002 to 2005.

Noid earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry with minors in mathematics and physics at the University of Tennessee in 2000 and his doctoral degree in chemistry at Cornell University in 2005.