Ivet Bahar
Stony Brook University, The State University of New York
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Primary Section: 29, Biophysics and Computational Biology Secondary Section: 21, Biochemistry Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2020)
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Biosketch
Ivet Bahar, is the Louis and Beatrice Laufer Endowed Chair of Physical and Quantitative Biology, and a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology in the Renaissance School of Medicine. She is a structural and computational biologist who served as a distinguished professor, and JK Vries Chair, in the Department of Computational and Systems Biology that she founded at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She also co-founded the Joint PhD program in Computational Biology between the U of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.
At Stony Brook University, Dr. Bahar serves as the Director of the Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology. The Bahar laboratory is known for pioneering novel models and methods in structural and computational and molecular biophysics and systems biology and pharmacology, including the widely used Elastic Network Models for protein dynamics. Her lab is supported by several national and international grants on a broad range of topics. At the Laufer Center, using a combination of structure-based modeling and machine learning methods, she conducts integrative research across multiple disciplines, from basic modeling of biomolecular dynamics and interactions, to identifying disease-causing mutations and developing drug candidates and therapeutic strategies for complex diseases, including cancer and neurological disorders.
Bahar is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). She has more than 340 publications. For more information, visit web page.
Research Interests
Ivet Bahar’s laboratory is interested in structure-based modeling of biomolecular systems interactions and function. She pioneered the adaptation of fundamental methods of statistical mechanics to exploring the structural dynamics of proteins and their assemblies. Using the elastic network models (ENMs) and methods introduced by her laboratory, she has examined several complex events such as the machinery of supramolecular complexes, the allosteric behavior of multidomain proteins and the signaling and regulation events modulated by receptors and transporters, with focus on neurobiological applications and drug discovery. Her studies showed that structural dynamics, not only sequence or structure, play a dominant role in determining biomolecular function. She also showed that biomolecular structures possess intrinsic, evolutionarily optimized, and robustly maintained abilities to effectuate cooperative conformational changes that enable their function. With the increase in structural and genomic data in recent years, she has expanded the scope of ENM-based studies to model chromosomal dynamics and bring a new structure-based perspective towards understanding the molecular basis of differential gene expression and regulation patterns exhibited by different types of cells.
