Omar N Demerdash

Bio

Omar Demerdash is a Liane Russell Fellow in the Biosciences division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  Dr. Demerdash is a computational biophysical chemist and medical doctor interested in leveraging both machine learning and first-principles physics-based methods to make improved predictions in the modeling of biomolecular structure and function with far-reaching biological applications ranging from human disease to plant-microbe symbiosis.  Dr. Demerdash received his Ph.D. in Biophysics in 2010 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for which he developed techniques to predict protein allostery, protein-protein interactions, and coarse-grained modeling of protein conformational changes.  He received his M.D. in 2013, also at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He then was a postdoctoral scholar from 2013-2017 in the College of Chemistry at the University of California-Berkeley in the laboratory of Prof. Teresa Head-Gordon where he pursued work in the algorithmic improvement of and quantum chemical characterization and development of advanced many-body potential energy models that have shown enhanced accuracy in prediction of certain biomolecular properties when compared with simpler models that are de rigueur in computational biophysics.

Publications