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FREE and open to the public.

Join us at The Science Cafe for the latest science served fresh with a side of coffee or other beverage. We meet at venues throughout the SoCal region, doing everything from daytrips to lectures. There's something for everybody!

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September Science Café - Using Video Game Tech and Social Networking to Design Drugs

Saturday, Sept. 21, 2013

3-4 pm

Upstart Crow Bookstore

Seaport Village Shopping Center, 

Downtown San Diego

RSVP http://www.meetup.com/SoCal-Science-Cafe/events/136827062/

In the past decade, there has been exponential growth in computer gaming using specialized graphics processors, and in social networking.  Both these technologies are now enabling us to perform computations in days, which otherwise would take months or years of traditional computing.  How these technologies are helping to meet today's pharmaceutical needs, with specific examples -- including protein folding and drug binding -- will be discussed.

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The pharmaceutical industry is expected to be a trillion-dollar industry by 2014.  The need for new medications for new and existing diseases is ever increasing.  However, the discovery of new drugs has not always kept pace.  Scientists are now turning to computers and gaming technologies to help them solve the problem of coming up with new and better drugs more rapidly.  The dream is to design drugs just by clicking a button on a computer, and technology is finally catching up to help make that dream a reality.

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Speaker: Dr. Hari Muddana, UCSD Drug Discpvery Institute

Dr. Hari Muddana is currently a Scientific Software Engineer at a local neuroscience industry firm. Dr. Muddana obtained the Ph.D. in Bioengineering in 2010 from Penn State, and went on to conduct postdoctoral research with UCSD professor, Michael Gilson.  There, Dr. Muddana developed computational methods for understanding the behavior of protein molecules. Dr. Muddana obtained the Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from the National Institute of Technology, India, and Texas A&M University, respectively.

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Dr. Muddana's current research interests include developing physics-based computational models for predicting the affinity of a small molecule to a protein, and predicting the solubility of drug-molecules in water. He is also interested in accelerating computational chemistry calculations using General Purpose Graphics Processors. an expert in the field, Dr. Muddana has authored 15 papers published in various internally recognized journals, and presented at numerous conferences including Biophysical Society Meeting and American Chemical Society National Meeting.

RSVP http://www.meetup.com/SoCal-Science-Cafe/events/136827062/

FREE and open to the public.

RSVP http://www.meetup.com/SoCal-Science-Cafe/events/136827062/

Agenda: 

3pm Intro by Brian Hart 

3:05 pm Few words from George Seymour or other San Diego Sigma Xi representative, about Sigma Xi 

3:10 pm Michael, you are invited to speak just a few words about the Drug Discovery Institute, and to introduce Hari 

3:15 pm-3:30 pm Short Presentation by the Speaker 

3:30pm-4:15-ish pm/fluid – Q&A and “conversation” with the audience.