Past Members

M.Sc., 2010

Thesis: High-Pressure Gases in Amorphous Polymers [link]

Current affiliation: Procter & Gamble

2007-2012
Adsorption behavior of model proteins on surfaces using dissipative particle dynamics

Farhad is a Ph.D. student in the Chemistry department at the University of Florida. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran in 2013. He then joined Prof. Mehmet Sayar’s group at Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey. His study examined the transferability of atomistic and coarse-grained models with the example of an amphiphilic peptide with lysine-leucine repeating residues (LK) using molecular dynamics simulations. During that time he developed a transferable coarse-grained model for peptides that displays an environment driven conformational transition. He earned his master’s degree in computational sciences from Koc University in Spring 2015.
He joined Dr. Colina’s group in Fall 2015, where he works on gel formation of mucus glycoproteins employing coarse-grained molecular dynamics. In this work, he presents a simple coarse-grained model to study the structure and dynamics of polymerized MUC5AC and entangled networks of them upon gel-formation. This model was constructed based on sequence information, domain, and composition analysis. After taking into account the information of submolecular architecture from high-resolution images of single extended molecules, he proposed a coarse-grained model consisting of four different bead types, each representing a molecular domain in MUC5AC.