Michael Shirts

Michael Shirts is professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, where his research develops and applies computational methods to model the behavior of biomolecules and materials. Shirts earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University before completing his Ph.D. in chemistry at Stanford University, where his fellowship began in 1999. His doctoral research produced landmark calculations of the free energies of protein folding using distributed computing. He has since developed widely used open-source computational tools for molecular simulation, including contributions to the GROMACS and OpenMM packages, and has studied the thermodynamics of protein-ligand binding with direct implications for drug discovery.