• G-protein coupled receptor modeling
• Protein-Protein Interactions
• Protein-Ligand Interaction
• Evolution
• Molecular Dynamics Simulations
• Free Energy Calculations
• Molecular Docking
• Homology Modeling
• Structure-Based Drug Design

I  earned my bachelor degree in Pharmacy at the Oxford College of Pharmacy in Bangalore, India. I went on to pursue MSc degree in drug discovery at the UCL-The School of Pharmacy, University of London in U.K. I then won a three year full scholarship from the University of Genova (Italy), which allowed me to gain Ph.D. degree in Computational Chemistry/Molecular Modeling at the Italian Institute of Technology, Genova, Italy. I worked as a research fellow for a year at the same institute. In the fall of 2015, I joined the Center for Modeling Complex Interactions at the University of Idaho as a postdoctoral fellow and worked for three years. In 2019, I was promoted and joined the Department of Biological Sciences as a research assistant professor.

• Patel JS*, Brown CJ, Ytreberg FM, Stenkamp DL. Predicting peak spectral sensitivitiesof vertebrate cone visual pigments using atomistic molecular simulations. PLoS Comp.Biol. 2018.
• Patel JS*, Ytreberg FM. Fast calculation of protein-protein binding free energy usingumbrella sampling with a coarse-grained model. J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2017.
• Gonzalez AG, Hug SM, Rodriguez-Verdugo A, Patel, JS#, Gaut BS. The effect ofmutations in the Esherichia Coli transcription factor Rho under thermal stress. Mol.Biol. Evol. 2017.
• Patel JS, Bertiotti A, Ronsisvalle S, Rocchia W, Cavalli A. Steered molecular dynamicssimulations for studying protein-ligand interaction in cyclin-dependent kinase5. J.Chem. Inf. Model. 2014.
• Patel JS, Branduardi D, Masetti M, Rocchia W, Cavalli A. Insights into ligand – proteinbinding from local mechanical response. J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2011.
• Haider SM, Patel JS, Poojari CS, Neidle S. Molecular modeling on inhibitor complexesand active-site dynamics of cytochrome P450 C17, a target for prostate cancer therapy.J. Mol. Biol. 2010.

Dr. Patel uses molecular dynamics and enhanced sampling techniques for studying "rare events" such as protein-ligand interactions, protein-protein interactions, folding/unfolding, and ion transfer via protein channels. He has experience in protein structure prediction using homology modeling, sequence analysis, modeling drug-target interactions using docking, virtual screening of libraries of small molecules against its target to identify 'hits' and prediction of their physio-chemical properties. He also performs free energy calculations to test the effects of mutations on molecular structure and is developing new approaches for calculating free energy with speed & accuracy and molecular dynamics simulations of systems involving protein, DNA and RNA molecular models.