Sharon Huo graduated from Peking University in 1990, majoring in Applied Chemistry. After working at the Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences for four years, she started her Ph.D. study at Boston University, followed by post-doctoral training at UC-San Francisco. She joined the faculty of Clark University in 2001 as a tenure-track Assistant Professor and was promoted to full professor in 2015. Her research is in the field of computational biophysics. She studies the allosteric effect in proteins, protein folding/misfolding/aggregation, and protein-ligand interaction using computational approaches. Her research was supported by NIH, NSF, and private agents. She has established herself in the field of studying amyloidogenic proteins. In recent years, one of her research foci has been to develop analysis methods to extract kinetic information from molecular dynamics simulations. The methods developed in her group include the MaxFlux reaction-path algorithm combined with the probabilistic roadmap motion planning method, graph representation of protein free energy landscape, and diffusion maps with a hybrid geometry energy-based kernel. Currently, her group is using graph theory and information theory to study allosteric proteins.
Group website: https://wordpress.clarku.edu/shuo/
Selected peer-reviewed publications:
Yang, T., Han, L., and Huo, S. (2022) Dynamics and Allosteric Information Pathways of Unphosphorylated c‑Cbl, J. Chem. Inf. Model. 62, 6148.
Tan, Q., Liu, H., Duan, M., and Huo, S. (2021) Interplay between Human Islet Amyloid Polypeptide Aggregates and Micro-heterogeneous Membranes, BBA – Biomembranes 1863, 183691.
Tan, Q., Duan, M,. Li, M., Han, Li., and Huo, S. (2019) Approximating dynamic proximity with a hybrid geometry energy-based kernel for diffusion maps. J. Chem. Phys. 151, 105101.
Duan, M., Liu, H., Li, M., and Huo, S. (2015) Network representation of conformational transitions between hidden intermediates of Rd-apocytochrome b562. J. Chem. Phys. 143, 135101.
Li, M., Duan, M., Fan, J., Han, L., and Huo, S. (2013) Graph representation of protein free energy landscape. J. Chem. Phys. 139: 185101.