Emiliano Brini - Featured Faculty 2023

Emiliano received his BS and MS in Chemistry of Materials from the University of Bologna (Italy) in 2006 and 2009, respectively. He then moved to TU Darmstadt (Germany) for his PhD, where he worked on constructing simplified computational models for studying polymers and molecular liquids. After completing his PhD, he worked for around 10 years at Stony Brook University (NY), first as a Postdoc and then as a Research Scientist. While at Stony Brook, Emiliano focused on studying the interaction between proteins and water and how to speed up the simulation of biologically relevant problems using experimental information.

The core research of Brini’s lab is rational drug design, which is based on the idea that to design new and better drugs, we need to understand, describe, and quantify protein behavior. The Brini lab applies this principle to study protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions to identify better drug candidates for cancer, genetic diseases, and infections. The lab uses physics-based simulations, acting as a “computational microscope” to observe protein behavior directly. However, plain physics-based simulations alone are too slow to investigate the behavior of proteins of biologically relevant size. To overcome this limitation, the group is also invested in the continuous development of a physics-based accelerator called MELD (Modelling Employing Limited Data). The research of the Brini lab is currently funded by two NIH grants.

Emiliano Brini
Associate Professor
School of Chemistry and Materials Science
College of Science