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Associate Professor��Michael Shirts’ earliest impression of Boulder dates from age 4, when his father was a postdoctoral researcher at CU. He vividly recalls tumbling down the rocket-shaped jungle gym at Boulder’s Scott Carpenter Park and being rushed to the emergency room.

Today, he has much better memories of Boulder and the university. As one of the newest faculty members in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Shirts spends his days teaching and researching a half-mile from the site of his childhood mishap.

Shirts holds degrees in chemistry from Harvard and Stanford and received the prestigious Fannie and John Hertz fellowship as well as the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award. After seven years on the University of Virginia’s chemical engineering faculty, he joined CU Boulder in fall 2015, where he leads a team of six graduate students and teaches chemistry to more than 400 freshman engineering students.

Shirts and his team work to improve computer simulations of molecular phenomena, providing useful insights for designing new materials and discovering information that can’t be discerned through direct experiment.

An engineer designing a new water purification membrane might turn to Shirts to predict how slight tweaks to the membrane’s pores will change the polymer at a molecular level, making it more or less effective at separating out contaminants. His research also could help pharmaceutical companies to predict which crystal structure would make a new drug most stable over time, more efficiently moving the process toward clinical trials. These types of simulations also can suggest which drug molecule might bind most tightly to a target protein and how that drug achieves its effectiveness.

In each case, Shirts’ computer simulations suggest what might happen in the real world – with fewer constraints on time, materials, cost or other conditions that might limit an experimental researcher.

“You’re stripping down reality and creating a model in which only the things you think are important are there, and you see if it behaves the way you think it does,” Shirts says.

With rapid advances in computing power and software over the last decades, the frontiers of Shirts’ research are no longer limited by computer speed. Many of his team’s simpler simulations generate results within a day, allowing researchers to ask ever more complicated questions.

However, simulations still can’t match experimental methods for accuracy, Shirts says, which is why he also works to create computational models that can more reliably mimic molecules’ behavior.

Discovering unique solutions to complex problems is part of Shirts’ repertoire. As a graduate student at Stanford, he was one of the initial developers of��, a crowdsourced computing project in which volunteers allow their personal computers to be used for simulations during times they would otherwise sit idle. Using downloadable software, the computers perform calculations that further research into such questions as protein misfolding and the biological processes behind Alzheimer’s, mad cow disease, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s and many cancers.

Despite offers to do molecular modeling in industry after earning his PhD, Shirts says he was more interested in an academic career that would allow him to answer the long-term questions most important to him and to help his students quench their curiosities as well.

“It really bugs me when I don’t get why something is happening,” Shirts says. “It’s just fun to understand why things happen and to then help other people understand as well.”