BioExcel Summer School 2026 Poster Prize Winners
The leading European Center of Excellence for Computational Biomolecular Research, BioExcel, will host a special edition of its webinar series featuring student speakers who received poster prizes at the BioExcel Summer School 2026. The special-edition webinar will be held on 22 September 2026.
Marc El Hasbany, a first-year PhD student at the Institute of Chemistry of Nice (ICN), Université Côte d’Azur in France, will explore the molecular mechanisms underlying the activation and inhibition of olfactory receptors, using molecular dynamics simulations, docking, and virtual screening to identify and characterize potential receptor ligands.
José Luis Muñoz Reyes, a Chemical and Bioprocess Engineer at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), will talk about molecular mechanisms of CXCR4 receptor activation through advanced molecular dynamics simulations, identifying intermediate states, potential allosteric sites, and opportunities for novel drug design.
Gianluca Santini, a first-year Ph.D. student in Chemistry at the University of Milano-Bicocca, will present an explainable artificial intelligence approach using graph neural networks and molecular dynamics data to identify functional patterns and allosteric mechanisms in proteins, with a particular focus on nuclear receptors.