(Contractor)
Education:
Ph.D., 1983, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA
B.S., 1977, California State University Fresno, Fresno, CA
Biography
Dr. Phil Cruz is a Computational Structural Biologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), with more than 30 years of experience in protein computer modeling and drug design. He holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Irvine, where he studied nucleic acid structure via NMR. As a post-doc at the University of California, Berkeley, he was a co-discoverer of Z-RNA, the left-handed helical form of RNA.
Prior to joining NIH, he served as a faculty member in the Biochemistry Department at Wright State University School of Medicine and held various roles at Tripos, a Computer-Aided Drug Discovery company. Currently, he provides computational structural biology expertise to NIAID intramural labs and is part of the NIAID Biovisualization team, which applies emerging technologies in visualization, including Virtual Reality, to projects at NIAID and beyond.