Graduate Keasby Travel Report – Hannah Asiki (2020, Chemistry in Cells – New Technologies to Probe Complex Biology and Medicine)

Thanks to the generous support of Univ, I was able to attend the SCI-RSC Workshop on Computational Tools for Drug Discovery in Birmingham. The workshop is held to allow medicinal chemists a chance to explore computational tools to help their research, and this November was the first one back in person since the pandemic.

At the workshop, I got to attend hands-on demonstrations of 4 different computational chemistry programmes: Optibrium, Chemical Computing Group, Schrödinger and Cresset. The programmes can carry out a range of interesting functions, from predicting Structure-Activity Relationships of compound families to compound docking in protein crystal structures. The demos were great, showing me the power of computational chemistry in drug discovery and how it could be applied to my research. I learnt a lot about computational tools and developed a new interest in computational medicinal chemistry! As an added bonus, I have a month’s free access to these computational tools following the workshop so I am now making the most of having this cutting-edge chemical prediction software at my fingertips!

I am grateful to Univ for supporting me and thank them for their generous support. I have learned a lot from this workshop and have returned to my research with fresh ideas guided by computational predictions which brings a new dimension to my project.

Find out more about the range of travel grants and scholarships available to assist Univ students on our Travel Grants page or read further travel reports.

Published: 22 February 2023

Explore Univ on social media