About the project coordinator
Marc Baaden is a CNRS researcher in physical chemistry at the LBT group in Paris. Since 2004, he leads a team focusing on interdisciplinary work at the interfaces of chemistry with both biology and computer science.
He has a strong background in molecular modeling of complex biological systems such as membrane proteins. One of his very recent successes in this respect is the work on a nicotinic receptor homologue [BOC09, NUR10, NUR11]. He received the 2010 young investigator award of the physical chemistry division of the French Chemical Society (SCF). His expertise concerns high performance and extreme computing, interactive simulations and the study of complex macromolecular systems.
Marc Baaden has previously coordinated two projects funded by the French ANR agency, one of which involved the MOAIS and LIFO teams as partner [FVNANO]. Some of the unique tools that were developed during this earlier project will be valuable starting points for the present project. In ExaViz, his particular expertise concerns extreme computing applications and interdisciplinary research making use of virtual reality and scientific visualization. A recent joint study with the MOAIS and LIFO partners, combining novel molecular representations and advanced shader-based visualization emphasizes the succesful and fruitful collaboration of these groups [CHA10, CHA11b] and their expertise in this field. International collaborations involve key players in the fields of membrane protein simulations (Prof. MSP Sansom, Oxford University) and visual analytics (Prof. T Ertl, VISUS institute Stuttgart).
