Current Position:

• Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, College of Art and Science
• Adjunct Professor, Department of Internal Medicine, Health Sciences Center
• Associate Director, Center for Computational Chemistry (C³)
• UNM Comprehensive Cancer Center (UNMCCC) full member

Email: yihe (at) unm.edu

Xuechen is a biochemist with a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of New Mexico. He has research experience in natural product biosynthesis, protein engineering, and functional genomics, including work on type II polyketide pathways.  He is currently a research scientist at the University of New Mexico, applying modern protein and peptide-engineering approaches to study PICK1, MDM2, and other scaffold protein systems. His goal after his fellowship is to continue doing research in academia or biotech, advancing the discovery and engineering of proteins and peptides.

Honors:
2023 NSF-GRFP Awardee
2023 2nd Place LoboBITES
2023 ACS invited speaker
2025 Hillard L. Smith-Dow Award

Emily is a graduate with a B.S. degree in Chemistry from Rollins College. She gained research experience that focused on the DEA of NO₂ and NO₂^-. She is currently interested in engineering proteins as biosensors to capture chemical compounds. Her goal after graduate school is to continue doing research for the pharmaceutical industry.

Xinyu earned his Master's degree in Biomedical Engineering from Wuhan University of Technology. His graduate studies primarily centered on drug design, utilizing molecular dynamics simulations. As he progresses through his PhD research, he aspires to gain a deeper understanding and enhance his skills in computational chemistry and structural biology.

I graduated from Explore Academy High School in 2024 and am currently pursuing a dual B.S. in Chemical Biology and Mathematics with a minor in Computer Science. I am primarily interested in how we can use both classical and deep learning methods to better understand, model, and target biological systems from individual proteins to genomes and complex networks. Eventually, I aim to be able to architect and apply deep neural nets for ligand and treatment design.