Alexander Tropsha was born in Moscow in 1960. He received his MS in Chemistry from Moscow State University in 1982 and PhD in Biochemistry and Pharmacology in 1986 from the same university. He immigrated to the US in 1989. In 1991, after two years of postdoctoral research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he joined the UNC School of Pharmacy as an Assistant Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Molecular Modeling. Currently, Dr. Tropsha is being promoted to the full Professor; he also holds position of the Associate Director of the Carolina Center for Genome Sciences.

The major area of Tropsha’s research is Biomolecular Informatics, which implies understanding relationships between structures (organic or macromolecular) and their properties (activity or function). In recent years, we have developed several important methodologies and software tools for Computer Assisted Drug Design (available at our Web server at http://mmlin1.pha.unc.edu/~jin/QSAR.) Concurrently, we have developed a new approach to protein 3D structure analysis and prediction based on the principles of statistical geometry (Delaunay tessellation). This approach affords determination of key structural and sequence motifs responsible for protein function. Some of our methodologies have been implemented on the Protein Structure Workbench at http://mmlsun4.pha.unc.edu/3dworkbench.html.