Oliver Beckstein

Oliver Beckstein leads a computational research group in the Center for Biological Physics and in the Department of Physics at Arizona State University.

He obtained his undergraduate degree (Diplom Physik) from the Department of Physics at the Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany and his doctoral degree (DPhil) from the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, UK. He held a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford and worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Tom Woolf at Johns Hopkins University and Mark Sansom in Oxford.

Beckstein's research group uses and develops computational methods to better understand the molecular mechanisms of biological processes. A special focus is on the quantitative prediction of the function and activity of proteins from the knowledge of their structures alone. The group has special expertise in transmembrane transport processess catalyzed by membrane proteins such as secondary active transporters and ion channels. The group contributes to the fields of structural biology, physiology, nanobiotechnology, and drug discovery. Professor Beckstein has also broad interests in computational method and software development, including the development of novel algorithms to sample and analyze molecular systems. He is a co-founder and core developer of the widely used open source MDAnalysis library for the analysis of biomolecular simulations.