Welcome Andreas Petrides: The New Foldit Developer at OMSF

We are excited to announce that Andreas Petrides is joining us at OMSF as the new Foldit Software Engineer. Andreas brings a wealth of experience and a fresh perspective to our team, making him a valuable addition to the Foldit project.

Andreas holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering and Computer Science from Northeastern University and has over three years of experience in full-stack development. His technical proficiency spans across multiple programming languages, including C++, Python, JavaScript, and Ruby. Andreas has spent the last few years working on Foldit. This experience coupled with his strong background in software development, positions him perfectly to lead the integration of Foldit into web and mobile environments.

Prior to joining us, Andreas worked for the Foldit team via UMass Dartmouth, where he contributed to the development and optimization of the Foldit game client. Among his accomplishments during this time were the addition of several new tools such as Trim, Untrim, and Refine Density. Refine Density is a B-factor refinement tool that performs molecular replacement on large electron density maps in a matter of seconds. Trim and Untrim allow Foldit players to focus on smaller regions of proteins, which in turn has enabled the game client to render larger protein structures, enhancing the overall gaming experience for users and allowing Foldit to tackle more challenging problems.

In his new role, Andreas will be leading the effort to integrate Foldit into web and mobile platforms. The goal of this expansion is to help Foldit reach a broader audience, particularly students using Chromebooks and iPads. He will also assist in maintaining the Foldit game client and web server, supporting scientific efforts by posting puzzles, and engaging with the Foldit community through blog posts, forum interactions, and participation in Foldit's Discord channel. Andreas’s position is supported through the 2025 fiscal year with the goal of positioning Foldit to be more competitive for cyber infrastructure grants and other national foundation and philanthropic support. 

We are confident that Andreas's expertise and dedication will drive Foldit's mission forward, harnessing the power of citizen science to advance protein design research. Join us in welcoming Andreas Petrides and reach out to him directly at apetrides32 [at] gmail [dot] com for any questions or conversations about Foldit and how it can help you in your classroom or research!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introducing Rosetta Commons Foundation and Levitate Bio

Dear members of the Rosetta Community, The Rosetta Commons Board is excited to announce a significant milestone in the evolution of our community and a step on our path toward the Future of Rosetta. We have created a non-profit organization, the Rosetta Commons Foundation, which has established a wholly-owned subsidiary company called Levitate Bio. Levitate Bio provides cloud-based automated protein modeling and design protocols using AI & Rosetta, available through annual subscriptions. With a mission similar to the Rosetta Commons, the Rosetta Commons Foundation aims to foster a collaborative community that contributes to knowledge and tools for computational modeling and design of biological macromolecules. Appointed by the Rosetta Commons Board, the Foundation’s initial Board currently consists of Jeff Gray, Julia Koehler Leman, and David Nannemann. We expect this leadership structure to evolve soon, with a more permanent Board structure announced in due course. What is unique
Read more

Announcing the winners of the Winter Protein Design Games 2024: Unleashing Innovation in Enzyme Engineering

Image
The Winter RosettaCon organizers want to thank Liberum Bio for sponsoring the experimental validation of the designs that they carried out in 8 days starting from digital sequences! Liberum Bio produces proteins at high yields in cell-free systems at a fraction of the usual cost and time via highly engineered strains and state-of-the art reaction mixtures. At Winter RosettaCon 2024 in Boston, the Rosetta Commons in partnership with Liberum Biotech hosted the inaugural Winter Protein Design Games , focusing on the design of Tobacco Etch Virus (TEV) protease variants. TEV protease is commonly used as a tool for sequence-specific protein cleavage, facilitating the purification of proteins without affinity tags. The competition challenged cross-institutional participating teams to engineer TEV proteases that exhibited enhanced substrate cleavage efficiency over the wild-type enzyme.  The competition was straightforward: design TEV protease variants that outperform the wild type in cleavi
Read more

Announcing Rosetta's Transition to a Public Repository (including Licensing Changes)

Dear Rosetta Community and users of Rosetta, We're excited to announce that we have moved the Rosetta code repository to a public repository! We have made this move to honor our longstanding philosophy of sharing our work publicly and making it broadly accessible to scientists. This change marks a new chapter for Rosetta, where future developments will be more collaborative and accessible.  This move required crucial changes to our workflow and licensing terms that are designed to streamline contributions to our platform. The new repository is accessible at https://github.com/RosettaCommons/rosetta . Licensing adjustments: The repository's public status means that non-commercial users no longer need to explicitly sign up for a license to access Rosetta. However, despite being publicly accessible, Rosetta is not open source; redistribution restrictions and other licensing restrictions remain in place for all users. For our commercial users, the existing license will continue as
Read more