Co-Investigator, Research Project 1, MISM
Assoc. Professor in Medicine, Duke University
Rory Henderson, PhD, Project Co-Lead, is an Associate Professor in Medicine at Duke University, Head of Molecular Modeling and Simulation in the Division of Structural Biology at Duke Human Vaccine Institute, and the Project 1 lead for the Duke Center for HIV Structural Biology. Dr. Henderson’s lab focuses on understanding how the dynamics of immune system macromolecules and their antigenic targets determine the immune response to infection, and how these dynamics can be manipulated to guide the selection of a favorable antibody response. He employs a diverse computational and experimental toolkit to interrogate key pathogen and antibody dynamics, apply rational design principles to develop immunogens and probe putative functional mechanisms, and investigate these details at high spatial and temporal resolution. This approach provides a promising way to accelerate the design and characterization of next-generation vaccine immunogens.
Dr. Henderson brings experience in molecular dynamics simulation, including classical, adaptive sampling, steered, metadynamics, and GaMD-based approaches. He has an extensive background in using atomic modeling to drive experimental investigations, including combining cryo-EM structure determination with molecular dynamics simulations to develop integrated experimental and computational methods for exploring protein dynamics. More recently, Dr. Henderson has begun to integrate machine learning/artificial intelligence tools into a high-throughput simulation pipeline. He leads and oversees all computational and experimental efforts in the MISM Research Project 1.