Awards
More information can be found at the Google news archive of Folding@home press stories and the archive on the Pande Lab.
August 2011: Prof. Vijay Pande is the recipient of the 2012 Michael and Kate Bárány Award for Young Investigators from the Biophysical Society for "developing field-defining and field-changing computational methods to produce leading theoretical models for protein and RNA folding."
July 2010: Joint Pande lab and Brunger lab researcher Dr. Michael J. Schnieders won the Best Poster Award at the 2010 "Electron Density and Chemical Bonding" Gordon Research Conference. The prize was awarded for work on X-ray crystallography refinement using the next generation "Atomic Multipole Optimized Energetics for Biomolecular Applications" (AMOEBA) force field. This work was supported by an award from the NSF to Vijay S. Pande, Jay W. Ponder, Teresa Head-Gordon and Martin Head-Gordon for “Collaborative Research: Cyberinfrastructure for Next Generation Biomolecular Modeling.” Award Number CHE-0535675.
March 2010: Folding@home researcher Greg Bowman was awarded the 2010 Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award from the American Chemical Society (ACS) for his talk on two paradigm shifts resulting from Folding@home: 1) the new methods that Folding@home uses to simulate protein folding, misfolding, etc, and 2) the results themselves, which suggest a significant change in protein folding theory.
December 2009: Folding@home researcher Greg Bowman was invited to compete for the Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award at the ACS. The Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Shift Award is given by the American Chemical Society (ACS) in honor of researchers who have made major paradigm shifts in science. Greg Bowman will be one of five researchers in the world competing for the award at the March 2010 ACS meeting.
November 2008: Prof. Vijay Pande named APS Fellow. The American Physical Society (APS) named Prof. Pande an APS Fellow in the Biophysics Division.
October 2008: Folding@home researcher Relly Brandman wins the best talk award at BCATS 2008 for her work on the ribosome. BCATS is Bay Area wide symposium on biomedical computation, including a very wide area ranging from the molecular scale to whole organisms. Relly presented her work on simulations of the ribosome, which has become a major focus for Folding@home and the Pande Lab. These have been submitted for peer reviewed publication, following Paula Petrone's ribosome recent work which has been published in PNAS. This is the fourth best talk award at BCATS for Folding@home in the seven year history of BCATS.
January 2008: Folding@home and its Director Prof. Vijay Pande is named a Netxplorateur of 2008. From their web site: Using "The world's largest supercomputer" according to the Guinness Book of Records, F@H seeks to analyze and understand protein folding (assembly), a little understood process that is fundamental to virtually all of biology. Hundreds of thousands of Sony PlayStation3's were added in 2007 to the distributed network run by Stanford University.
September 2007: Guinness World Record. From their award: On 16 September 2007, Folding@home, a distributed computing network operating from Stanford University (USA) achieved a computing power of 1 petaflop -- or 1 quadrillion floating point operations per second. The project uses the power of peoples' home computers, as well as their PlayStation3s, to simulate the processes inside living cells that can lead to diseases, such as Alzheimer's Disease.
June 2006: Folding@home Principle Investigator Vijay Pande wins the Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award from the Protein Society. From their web site: "The Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award, sponsored by Merck Research Laboratories, recognizes a significant contribution to the study of proteins by a scientist who is in the early stages of an independent career and, generally, not more than 40 years of age at the time of the award. The 2006 awardee is Dr. Vijay Pande (Stanford University) for his unique approach to employing advances in algorithms that make optimal use of distributed computing, which places his efforts at the cutting edge of simulations. The results have stimulated a re-examination of the meaning of both ensemble and single-molecule measurements, making Dr. Pande's efforts pioneering contributions to simulation methodology."
October 2005: Folding@home researchers Vishal Vaidyanathan and Nick Kelley win the best talk award at BCATS 2005 for Alzheimer's Disease work. BCATS is Stanford's symposium on biomedical simulation. Vishal and Nick presented their work on simulations of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). These results will soon be submitted for peer reviewed publication and represent a significant advance in the simulation of protein aggregation at the heart of AD. This is the third best talk award at BCATS for Folding@home. Another member of the team, Chris Snow, won an award at BCATS for his poster on the ribosome as well.
August 2005: Folding@home researcher Chris Snow receives award at international conference for the second year in a row. Recent scientific results stemming from the Folding@home project garnered an award for "Best Poster" at the 19th Symposium of the Protein Society in Boston. This year's work from FAH centered around recent work on the ribosome, which is relevant both for fundamental biology (how proteins are synthesized, also known as "translation") as well as a better understanding of how many antibiotics work (roughly 50% of all antibiotics target the ribosome). This is the second Protein Society award for Snow and the third for FAH in general, which has won the award in three of the last 4 meetings.
November 2004: Folding@home Founder and Director Prof. Vijay Pande awarded by Global Indus Technovators. The Global Indus Technovators are a group based at MIT has awarded Prof. Pande a Technovator award in the Biotech/Med/Healthcare sector. Technovators2004The Global Indus Technovator Awards have been instituted to recognize and felicitate 20 distinguished innovators of Indus origin working at the cutting-edge of technology that may be harnessed for far-reaching applications.
October 2004: Folding@home team member Guha Jayachandran wins top award at BCATS 2004. BCATS is Stanford's symposium on biomedical simulation. Guha gave an invited talk on his work on protein folding and the advances possible with the power of Folding@home. In the four years that BCATS has been run, this is the fourth time a Folding@home team member has given an invited talk and the second time that the Folding@home team has won the top prize.
August 2004: Folding@home researcher Chris Snow receives award at international conference. Recent scientific results stemming from the Folding@home project garnered an award for "Best Poster" at the 18th Symposium of the Protein Society in San Diego. This year's symposium, held in August, brought together hundreds of scientists from around the world to discuss recent breakthroughs in all areas of protein science.
February 2004: FAH results considered one of the "hot papers" of 2003. The Nature paper by Chris Snow et al from Folding@home was considered to be one of the "hot papers" from 2003. Check out the ISI web site http://www.esi-topics.com/nhp/2004/january-04-VijayPande.html for more details.
May 2003: Vijay Pande awarded a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. In 1969, the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation established the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awards Program to strengthen the teaching and research careers of talented young faculty in the chemical sciences. Based on institutional nominations, the program was designed to provide discretionary funding to faculty at early stages in their careers. Criteria for selection included a commitment to education and an independent body of scholarship that signaled the promise of continuing outstanding contributions to both research and teaching.
October 2002: Folding@home team member Bojan Zagrovic wins top award at BCATS 2002. BCATS is Stanford's symposium on biomedical simulation. Both Bojan Zagrovic and Chris Snow from the F@h team were invited to give talks and Bojan received the top prize. The BCATS 2002 Symposium provides an open, interdisciplinary forum for Stanford students and post-docs to disseminate and share their latest work in fields relating to biomedical computation. This symposium was organized around an identification of a need to integrate dispersed and separate efforts in biomedical computation across Stanford University. The BITS faculty organization (Biomedical Information Technology at Stanford) is sponsoring this student-organized event. BCATS 2002 is co-sponsored by the Bio-X Program, as part of the Bio-X Saturday Morning Forum Series. It is also being supported by NIH's Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative (BISTI).
For more information, see http://bcats.stanford.edu .
September 2002: Lead Folding@home developer Guha Jayachandran named as a Siebel Scholar. The Siebel Scholars web site hasn't been updated for this year yet, but here's a general summary excerpted from it: "The purpose of the Siebel Scholars program is threefold: to recognize graduate students who have demonstrated the highest levels of academic achievement and leadership; to support the graduate programs at universities that have made great contributions to the information technology industry and society; and to create a unique community of individuals who will share knowledge, engage in innovative projects, and provide one another with professional support throughout their careers. There is no end to what these Scholars, the best and brightest in their fields, can achieve individually and as a community, and it is Siebel Systems' privilege to assist them in this process." The site is at http://www.siebelscholars.com .
August 2002: Lead Genome@home researcher Stefan Larson receives award at international conference. Recent scientific results stemming from the Genome@home project garnered an award for "Best Poster" at the 16th Symposium of the Protein Society in San Diego. This year's symposium, held in August, brought together hundreds of scientists from around the world to discuss recent breakthroughs in all areas of protein science. The award was presented to Stefan Larson, lead researcher for the Genome@home project, for his poster, entitled, "Searching sequence space by large-scale protein design" (Stefan M. Larson, Jeremy L. England, Amit Garg, John R. Desjarlais, and Vijay S. Pande).
June 2002: MIT names Prof Vijay Pande among today’s top 100 innovators. To learn more, see the MIT site.
