Assistant Professor, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago
Project Title: Inducing Off-Pathway Assembly of HIV Gag Polyprotein with Computationally Designed Peptides
Award Year: 2023
Biography
Dr. José Villegas earned a B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of California Santa Barbara, an MA in Chemistry from Brooklyn College, and Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. His doctoral dissertation was on the computational design of protein-ligand and protein-protein interactions. He was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Zuckerman Postdoctoral Scholarship to travel to Israel and continue his research at the Department of Structural Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science. There, he worked to quantify the influence of protein composition on the interactions between proteins using a combination of computational and experimental approaches. His current research program aims to design peptide-based therapeutics that trap disease targets in order to inactive them and target them for degradation.