Alfie Brownless Receives ACS Promise in COMP Award

Graduate student Alfie Brownless has been awarded the "Promise in COMP" Award from the Division of Computational Chemistry of the American Chemical Society. She has been selected to present at the Women Make COMP symposium during the Spring 2026 National Meeting of the ACS.

Alfie is a member of the Kamerlin lab who studies the dynamics of enzymes, an important class of biochemical catalysts:

I use computational methods to understand enzyme dynamics and their impact on catalysis. In particular, my projects typically revolve around understanding how deleterious mutations and amino acid substitutions impact conformational dynamics in diseased cells, providing us useful information as to how to target particular enzymes for therapeutic purposes. Similarly, I often characterize altered dynamics exhibited by artificially-engineered enzymes and explain how individual amino acid substitutions located outside of an active site can dramatically alter catalysis. I also work on the development of software and computational tools to further aid in these types of analyses.

We in the School are extremely proud of Alfie's accomplishment and commend her efforts to advance the impact of women in computational chemistry. Congratulations, Alfie! 
(Shared by the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.)