• April 2019 ~ Dylan Shea, graduate student in Molecular Engineering in the Daggett Lab, is first author on a paper in PNAS demonstrating that the toxic form of the beta-amyloid peptide contains alpha-sheet structure and complementary de novo alpha-sheet peptides inhibit the toxicity in in vitro, in cells, and in two different AD animal models. More...
• April 2019 ~ News regarding our research. More...
• April 2019 ~ More news regarding our research. More...
• July 2018 ~ Dylan Shea, musician and molecular engineer of the Daggett Lab, spurred Elon Musk to state his commitment to supply houses in Flint, Michigan with clean water! More...
• Congratulations to Natasha Paranjapye who received a Mary Gates Research Scholarship for 2018!
• Congratulations to Timothy Bi who received a Washington Research Foundation Fellowship for 2017-2018!
• Congratulations to Cheng-Chieh Hsu (aka Steven) who received a Mary Gates Research Scholarships for 2017!
• Valerie Daggett was been inducted as a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, 2017! More...
• Congratulations to Lauren Martini who received a Mary Gates Research Scholarship for 2018!
• Congratulations to Nathan Maris who received the Biochemistry Department's Research Excellence Award at the 2016 Graduation Ceremony!
• Congratulations to Matt Childers who has been been renewed to continue as a predoctoral trainee on the Bioengineering Cardiovascular Training Grant!
• We are putting the final touches on documentation and licensing paperwork so that we can release our molecular modeling package in lucem molecular mechanics! More...
• Congratulations to Clare Towse who received the 2015 UW Postdoc Mentor of the Year Award! See the department's article on Clare by pressing here.
• Congratulations to Alissa Bleem who received a 2015 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!
• Our amyloid work is included in an article on Innovative Medicine: Researchers develop advanced treatments through cutting-edge science in the November Issue of the Alaska Airlines Magazine. More...
• FINALLY, experimental results backing our 2004 hypothesis that alpha-sheet structure is associated with toxicity during amyloidosis has just gone live in eLife! Get the paper here. See the UW announcement here.
• We have released DIVE, our Data Intensive Visual Analytics software framework for accessing, streaming, interrogating, comparing, and visualizing big data. See our new papers in Bioinformatics and IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (see Publications page). Get more information about downloading DIVE here.

Pre-2012

• Undergrads interested in conducting research in the Daggett Lab over the summer will only be considered through established UW programs, such as the NNIN REU, Amgen Scholars Program, NASA Internships, and NSF Pathways to Science. Note that these programs have quickly approching deadlines.
• Undergraduate Robert Su received a prestigious Capstone Scholarship from the Department of Bioengineering as well as a Mary Gates Research Scholarship for his Capstone Project work on DIVE. DIVE is a piece of software currently under development in the Daggett Lab for visualizing large datasets. Congratulations, Robert!
• The group's work on urea denaturation was referenced in an article on protein unfolding published by the Royal Society of Chemist ry.
• Valerie is honored to have been named a Biophysical Society Fellow for 2011 for her technical innovations and improvements in the field of molecular dynamics simulation.
• Congratulations to the Daggett Lab's 2011 graduates! Byron Kwok graduated with a B.S. in bioengineering, and Jackson Kellock graduated Magna Cum Laude with a B.S. in Chemistry.
• A team of graduate students from the engineering school, including the Daggett Lab's Jonathan Cheng, was awarded 2nd place in the UW Environmental Innovation Challenge presented by the Foster School of Business. The team created a system to facilitate water disinfection using solar energy for use in the developing world.
• Graduate students Denny Bromley and Steve Rysavy presented their new data visualization program at the 2010 Microsoft eScience Workshop in Berkeley, CA.
• The group's paper, "Dynameomics: A Comprehensive Database of Protein Dynamics", which was published in the April issue of Structure, was a Research Highlight in the June issue of Nature Methods. The paper describes the science and methods behind the group's publicly available Dynameomics Database.
  • The paper was also featured in NewsRx.com.
• The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has awarded the Daggett Group 2 million hours for 2010 for their molecular dynamics simulations. This time will used for the Dynameomics Project.
• Congratulations go out to undergraduate Sara Calhoun who was awarded a Washington Research Foundation Fellowship!
• We have recently developed an XML schema for standardizing, cataloging and sharing parameters and molecular definitions for molecular mechanics force fields.
• The Microsoft External Research booklet on Socially Relevant Computing featured an article on the Dynameomics Project and how it pertains to understanding and developing treatments for diseases such as Alzheimers, Parkinson's, and cancer.
• The Daggett Group and other labs are working with Microsoft External Research to create a GrayWulf cluster optimized to analyze their Dynameomics data. Read more about the project in this report from Microsoft and on the msdn eScience blog.
• The Daggett Group was awarded 1.5 million hours on the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) for 2009! This computer time supports the Dynameomics Project.
• The Dynameomics Project, which began running on the supercomputers at NERSC in 2005 with the goal of simulating the unfolding pathways of all known protein folds, was listed as a major accomplishment in Advanced Scientific Computing Research at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
• The group's recent paper, "The intrinsic conformational propensities of the 20 naturally occurring amino acids and reflection of these propensities in proteins" published in PNAS, was highlighted by both NewsRX and Pharmacy Choice.
• Congratulations to Sara Calhoun who was awarded a Mary Gates Scholarship to work on docking and drug design this year! Congratulations are also in order for Michelle McCully who received an NDSEG Fellowship, a three-year graduate research award, from the Department of Defense.
• A Press Release from Microsoft highlighting the Daggett Group's application of the new SQL Server 2008 to their Dynameomics Database was picked up by The New York Times, Forbes, CNBC, and others.
• A Case Study was done by Microsoft in August of 2008 investigating the data management scheme the group has developed for the Dynameomics Database. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and OLAP are used to mine over 20 terabytes of simulation data which reside on three servers.
• Bioinform, one of GenomeWeb's Application-Focus Newsletters, featured the Daggett Group's research in an article by Vivien Marx in July of 2008.
• Microsoft featured the Group's integration of Windows software in a Case Study in June of 2008. High-performance computing clusters running Windows Compute Cluster Server are used to run the lab's molecular dynamics software with better performace than the optimized Linux version, and Microsoft SQL Server powers the 14-terabyte Dynameomics Database. The group's application of Microsoft's software was also featured in a Press Release.
• Bleeding Edge Biotech, a blog hosted by Carnegie Mellon computational biologist Adam Kraut, highlighted the Dynameomics Project in April of 2008.
• The Daggett Lab was awarded 10 million processor hours for 2008 on the Department of Energy's supercomputers! The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), located in Berkeley, CA, is one of the largest computing facilities in the world for basic scientific research.
• The Washington Research Foundation highlighted the Group's in house molecular dynamics software, in lucem molecular mechanics, in their 2007 Annual Report.
• The Daggett Group was named a UW Technology Gap Innovation Fund Recipient (see page 24) for 2007. This grant supports development of a graphical user interface and protein and drug design functionality for ilmm, the Group's in house molecular dynamics software.
• The Benjamin Hall Interdisciplinary Research Building, one of only 11 Gold-level green buildings in the US, is the new home of the Daggett Lab.
• The Daggett Group's work on prion protein was referenced in the September 2007 issue of Wellcome Trust's Big Pictures Series on Epidemics. [PDF]
• The work on prion protein was again cited in the August 2007 Issue of Chemical and Engineering News.
• The Dynameomics project and potential startup company was featured in the Biomedical Computation Review article "Biocomputation Startups: Where Does Value Lie?" by Katharine Miller. [PDF]
• The Department of Energy awarded the Daggett group 2 million processor hours in 2005 through an Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment Award (INCITE), one of 3 awards in the country, for the Molecular Dynameomics project. [DOE press release]
  • Update: The NERSC Annual Report feature, "Proteins in Motion," details the Daggett group's Dynameomics Project.
  • Update: The Department of Energy has awarded the Daggett group an additional 5 million processor hours at NERSC for 2006 and 2007!
• Now you can download Powerpoint slides of our prion conversion trajectory. If you want to know how your experimental data compare with our model or you want specific figures or analyses email us.
• The Dynameomics project was the subject of a recent article in The Scientist, "Unraveling Protein Folding" by Melissa Lee Phillips. [PDF]
• The Daggett Group's work on amyloid disease was the subject of recent editorials in Science by Orla Smith [PDF] and in Nature by Christopher Surridge. [PDF]