David Mobley, UNO assistant professor of chemistry, has been awarded the prestigious Hewlett-Packard Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in Computational Chemistry.

Mobley was among four recipients presented the award at the national American Chemical Society meeting held August 16-20 in Washington, D.C. The awards are presented to junior tenure-track assistant professors who work in the area of algorithm and methods development.

Mobley, who joined the UNO faculty in fall 2007, has bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in physics from the University of California, Davis where his graduate research focused on computer modeling at the interface of physics, chemistry and biology.

He also conducted post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Ken Dill, professor of biophysics and associate dean of research, at the University of California, San Francisco on protein-ligand bonding, small molecule solvation and the development of new computational tools for predicting binding affinities between the proteins and small molecules from all-atom molecular simulations.

Mobley's research at UNO focuses on similar issues, utilizing molecular simulations to predict and understand thermodynamic properties of molecules and their interactions. The methods he is working on for predicting binding, solvation and solubility are likely to ultimately find application in improving the pharmaceutical drug discovery pipeline.