Methods in Biomolecular Modelling

Thomas Keal is a Principal Scientist in the Computational Chemistry Group at STFC Daresbury Laboratory and Honorary Professor at the UCL Department of Chemistry, UK. His research interests are in multiscale QM/MM methods and their application to problems in biomolecular and materials modelling. He completed his PhD in 2005 in the group of David Tozer at Durham University, focussing on the development of new exchange-correlation functionals for density functional theory. He then moved to a postdoctoral position in the group of Walter Thiel in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany, working on methods for excited state optimisation and dynamics of biomolecules. He joined Paul Sherwood’s group at Daresbury in 2008 to continue work on methods development in the ChemShell QM/MM software package, and now leads the team developing ChemShell, which is widely used in the investigation of biomolecular reaction mechanisms.