Dimitrios
Morikis

Dr. Dimitrios Morikis is a Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California Riverside (UCR). He is also a faculty member at UCR’s Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program and the Institute for Integrative Genome Biology. His work is highly cross-disciplinary using methods from biophysics, structural biology, computational chemistry, biomolecular informatics, and bioengineering. His current work focuses on immune system function and regulation, knowledge-based drug design, design of proteins with tailored properties, design of peptide-single elements of secondary structure, and development of structural bioinformatics methods. His research is hybrid, and computational, with emphasis on electrostatic calculations, molecular dynamics simulations, docking-based virtual screening, and experimental, with emphasis on NMR spectroscopy. Dr. Morikis has been working on the development of complement system inhibitors for 17 years, and he has been a co-developer of compstatin family peptides that are candidates to become therapeutics for macular degeneration.