About

Hi there! I’m Yossa, a computational biologist / structural bioinformatician at National University of Singapore (NUS) and Bioinformatics Institute (BII), Singapore. I am a part of Yew Wen Shan’s synthetic biology lab in NUS and Fan Hao’s structure-based ligand discovery and design group in BII. I currently use molecular modelling and docking methods for rational design and engineering of enzymes.

I am a chemist by training and did mostly molecular dynamics simulation for my doctoral work, with a brief stint in experimental structural biology work. I have worked with diverse systems: from proteins, to triplex nucleic acids, and the ribosome; as well as diverse computational biophysical techniques from conventional molecular dynamics, lambda dynamics, free energy perturbation, to QM/MM calculations. My doctoral thesis is publicly available here and from therein I have extracted the layman summary into a blog post here.

I received my PhD jointly from Karolinska Institutet, Sweden and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and BSc in Chemistry and Biological Chemistry from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

I constantly find myself at the interface of things, straddling between two worlds: chemistry and biology; Singapore and Sweden; experimental and computational. I strive to be a bridge, especially between experimental and computational practicioners — and it is easy to see the parallel to my interest in science communication, which is bridging the scientist and the layman.

For more details, you may want to take a look at my CV (pdf) – updated Nov 2020.