Michael Gilson

Dr. Michael Gilson received his bachelor’s from Harvard College (Bioengineering), and his MD and PhD (Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics) from Columbia University. Dr. Gilson has over 25 years of expertise in the development and evaluation of methods for computer-aided drug design. As a physician–scientist, his contributions provide a clinical perspective with a commitment to doing research that advances human health and well-being.

At UCSD Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Dr. Gilson is currently Professor and Chair in Computer-Aided Drug Design and he co-directs UC San Diego’s Center for Drug Discovery Innovation. He has made substantial contributions (with work appearing in over 130 peer-reviewed journals) to continuum solvation models, theory and methods for calculation of absolute protein-ligand binding free energies, and tools to analyze the role of binding-site water in molecular recognition. Moreover, his lab created the first publicly accessible database of protein-ligand interactions, BindingDB, which is extensively cited and used worldwide and, of note, serves a growing set of applications in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

He has been widely recognized for his work: Detur Prize (1978); John Harvard Scholarship (1978,1979); Tau Beta Pi Engineering Award (1981); Alfred Steiner Award (1987); Associated Medical Schools Award (1987); Louis Gibofsky Memorial Prize (1989); Howard Hughes Medical Institute Physician Research Fellowship (1991-94). Distinguished Lecture in Computational and Mathematical Biology, University of California, Irvine (2014); Endowed Chair in Computer-Aided Drug Design, UC San Diego (2010-present); 5th Annual Kollman Lectureship, UC San Francisco (2016).