Lillian Chong

Dr. Lillian T. Chong is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh, with joint faculty affiliations in Molecular Biophysics and Computational Biology. She earned her B.S. in Chemistry from MIT and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from UC San Francisco. The Chong Lab focuses on computational biophysics, developing unbiased “weighted ensemble” path sampling methods to dramatically improve the efficiency of simulating rare biophysical events like protein folding and binding. As the primary driving force behind the open-source WESTPA software suite, her methodologies have accelerated computational timelines by multiple orders of magnitude. Her work in high-performance computing includes an international collaboration that won the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Gordon Bell Special Prize for simulating the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein mechanism.