Program Directors
Alex Dickson
Associate Professor,
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Computational Mathematics Science and Engineering
Alex Dickson is a computational biophysicist focused on the interactions of drug-like molecules with their targets in the cell. To study these interactions, his group develops new algorithms that can speed up the observations of long-timescale processes such as binding, unbinding and protein conformational changes. His group also develops new methods for generating small drug-like molecules in protein binding sites, which can eventually be used to help discover novel treatments for a broad range of human diseases. He is also currently serving as a Program Chair for the COMP division of the American Chemical Society, as well as the organizer of their bi-annual Machine Learning in Chemistry Symposium. Prior to arriving a Michigan State, he received his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Chicago and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan.
Mahmoud Parvizi
Academic Specialist - Research,
Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research
Mahmoud Parvizi is a theoretical and computational physicist servings as the Training and Education Coordinator at the Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research (ICER). Mahmoud develops and implements training and classroom support programs for research computing to enable and support researchers in utilizing High-Performance Computing (HPC) resources. Mahmoud’s current research focus is Agentic AI for HPC workflows. Before joining ICER as faculty, Mahmoud was a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Michigan State University with a focus on applications of machine learning and cloud-computing workflows. Mahmoud earned his PhD in physics from Vanderbilt University with research focused on high-energy theory in the context of early universe cosmology as well as computational astrophysics.