Ben Sellers
Senior Scientist (Cheminformatics), Discovery Chemistry & Computational Drug Discovery
"I am humbled every day by discoveries that increase our understanding of life and disease. I feel fortunate to work with others in developing these discoveries into medicines."
I joined the Computational Drug Discovery group at Genentech in 2009. My role involves developing computational tools and modeling of potential drugs as part of therapeutic project teams. My background is also a mix of software engineering and science; I developed computer-aided design software for several years at Autodesk, Inc. before diving into protein modeling in the Jacobson lab at UCSF. Genentech is a fantastic, collaborative environment that values risk-taking and basic science.
Featured Publication
A Comparison of Quantum and Molecular Mechanical Methods to Estimate Strain Energy in Druglike Fragments.
J Chem Inf Model. 2017 Jun 26;57(6):1265-1275.
Sellers BD, James NC, Gobbi A.
I am primarily interested in the development and refinement of physics-based methods for predicting protein-ligand interactions. My work has included analysis of limitations in industry force fields relative to quantum calculations and development of methods for understanding pi-pi interactions. I have also combined fast, statistics-based methods with physics-based rescoring. Ongoing, I am interested in increasing industry use of molecular dynamics and free-energy calculations.
- University of California, San Francisco, Ph.D. in Biophysics & Quantitative Biology – 2008
- Cornell University, B.S. in Applied and Engineering Physics – 1993
- Genentech Scholar Graduate Fellowship – 2004
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Honorable Mention – 2003
