Lillian Chong
University of Pittsburgh

Lillian Chong is a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. The research focus in the Chong lab is on the development and application of molecular simulation strategies to characterize the pathways and kinetics of rare events in biology, including protein binding and large conformational switching transitions. Her lab developed and maintains WESTPA, an open-source, highly scalable software package for the execution and analysis of the weighted ensemble strategy, which can enhance the efficiency of generating pathways and rate constants for rare events by orders of magnitude over standard simulations. They are also developers of the latest AMBER force field that features implicitly polarized atomic charges. Prof. Chong was a joint postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Vijay Pande and Dr. William Swope at Stanford University and the IBM Almaden Research Center, respectively. She earned a B.S. in Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and received her Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of California at San Francisco with the late Prof. Peter Kollman. She is the recipient of a Hewlett-Packard Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, Carnegie Science Emerging Female Scientist Award, and a University of Pittsburgh Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences Bellet Teaching Excellence Award. Outside of the lab, Prof. Chong is the founding Editor of the Lab Musings magazine on Medium for creative science writing by undergraduates at the University of Pittsburgh.

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