Matthew Zwier, Ph.D. 2013. Matthew Zwier came to Pitt after receiving a B.S. degree from Hope College and an M.S. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After joining Prof. Lillian Chong’s group at Pitt in 2010, he developed the first highly scalable software (called “WESTPA”) for executing the weighted ensemble strategy for enhanced sampling of rare events (e.g. protein folding and binding) with rigorous kinetics. This freely available WESTPA software currently has >100 users world-wide. Matthew’s work in the Chong group resulted in 8 papers, 4 of them as primary author. Notably, Matt generated the first atomistic simulations of complete pathways for a protein-peptide binding process with rigorous rate constants, as enabled by the weighted ensemble strategy (Zwier et al., Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 2016). Before graduating in 2013, he received a Pitt Arts & Sciences Predoctoral Fellowship as well as a Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship.
After graduating from Pitt with his Ph.D. in 2013, Matthew moved onto his “dream faculty position” at a primarily undergraduate institution (PUI), i.e. Drake University in the Chemistry Department. In 2019, Matthew was promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure. Matthew’s research interests include building connections between computer simulations and spectroscopic experiments, and efficient storage and analysis techniques for terabyte-scale data sets. He teaches physical chemistry, and is particularly keen on integrating the use of molecular modeling techniques in chemical education. Matthew received the Drake University College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences Teacher of the Year in 2016.