As you know if you have been following this blog, I have always been fascinated by how the world around us works. Why is the sky blue? Why are bubbles in a soft drink spherical? How do we fall in love? What are we really made of?

This inherent curiosity led me to become a scientist. I studied Chemistry but soon enough I realized that being a chemist makes a huge mess or at least I made one in the lab! Fortunately, I then realized that computers exist and they make things much cleaner. I discovered that today it is possible to build chemicals, study reactions, or even make drugs within a desktop computer by performing virtual experiments in a similar way as the typical chemists. This type of chemistry is called “computational chemistry”. So I became a computational chemist. Indeed, I literally live in a virtual reality world, where everything from chemical reactions to drugs, food, materials, cosmetics, electronics, and proteins is being modeled and simulated. And you won’t believe it, but, yes, I do have a job!

I am a group leader at the Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens.  I specialize in “computer-aided drug design”, so the computer is my Virgil in the world of drugs (to paraphrase the original Nobel Committee tagline). The main activity of my lab is the design of anti-cancer candidate drugs. Recent advances in computer-aided drug design allow us to develop drugs specifically designed for a given protein, shortening the development cycle of new drugs.

Do you want to learn more about what it means to be a computational chemist and how I spend my day? For more details and a video on the life of a computational chemist, please read my full blog post at the Wiley Exchanges site.

Enjoy!

PS. My Doktorvater, Jeremy Smith, was also kind enough to link to this post in his own blog!