People
Mike Fortunato
Mike Fortunato grew up in Willow Grove in southeastern Pennsylvania. He did his undergraduate studies at the Pennsylvania State University where he earned his B. S. in Materials Science and Engineering with an option in Polymers Science and Engineering and a minor in Chemistry. In the summer of 2011, Mike participated in the REU in Soft Materials at the Pennsylvania State University studying biomaterials and water wetting.
Mike joined the Colina group in the Summer of 2012 and focused his study on the solution behavior of immunoglobulin G using fully-atomistic and coarse-grained simulation models. Immunoglobulin G is a glycoprotein molecule that is often used as a template in designing monoclonal antibodies for use in therapeutic treatment. This work was the subject of the thesis for his M. Sc. degree which he will earn in Spring 2015.
Following completion of his M. Sc. degree, the focus of his research will switch to porous polymer simulations. Using the Polymatic software developed previously in our group, he will studying how adding small molecules to PIM membranes alters their gas separation capabilities.
His research will also be focused on providing the Polymatic software as a cloud computing application accessible to users of all expertise using the nanoHUB infrastructure. Cloud computing applications on nanoHUB are accessed using a standard web browser, where users can provide input and analyze output from simulation tools without needing to know the back-end details of high performance computing.
Publications:
- Fortunato, M. E.; Colina, C. M. “Effects of Galactosylation in Immunoglobulin G from All-Atom Molecular Dynamics Simulations.” J. Phys. Chem. B, 2014, 118 (33), 9844–9851. [doi]
Further Education:
- CCP5 Methods in Molecular Simulation Summer School, Manchester University, Manchester, UK, July 21-30, 2013. [website]
