Rodney Versace, Ph.D.

Dr. Rodney Versace teaches courses in general chemistry. His research interests fall in the area of computational physical chemistry and biochemistry. His main interest is the function of biological macromolecules, such as proteins, lipids and nucleic acids.

Dr. Rodney Versace received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from The City University of New York and performed his postdoctoral research in the field of Computational Biochemistry in the Dr. Themis Lazaridis Laboratory at the City College of New York.

His research interests fall in the area of Computational Physical Chemistry and Biochemistry. His main interest is to find out how biological systems such as proteins, lipids and nucleic acids work. Specifically, he seeks to understand and to characterize the relationship between the structure of biomolecules and their respective function, by analyzing the conformational changes that a molecule may suffer as a function of time due to the interactions with its aqueous or lipidic environment, and how these conformational changes affect its normal biological functions. To this end, several bioinformatics, theoretical and computational approaches are applied or developed.

His goal is to get a better understanding of the inter- and intra-molecular forces in the system that will be useful in obtaining meaningful mechanistic hypotheses that can be tested experimentally.

Modeling Protein – Micelle systems in implicit water
Versace, R; Lazaridis, T.
Journal of Physical Chemistry B, 2015, 119, 8037-8047

The treatment of solvent in multiscale biophysical modeling
Lazaridis, T.; Versace, R.
Israel Journal of Chemistry, 2014, 54, 9: 1074-1083