Dr. Andrej Sali is a distinguished computational structural biologist whose pioneering work has transformed structural biology through innovative computational approaches. Currently serving as Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences and the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, he has established himself as a leading figure at the intersection of computation and molecular biology. Born in Kranj, Slovenia in 1963, Sali earned his Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of Ljubljana in 1987 before pursuing his doctoral studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he received his PhD in Molecular Biophysics in 1991 under Tom Blundell. Following postdoctoral research with Nobel laureate Martin Karplus at Harvard University, he joined the faculty of Rockefeller University in 1995, later moving to UCSF in 2003 to establish his research program at the forefront of computational structural biology.
Sali's most significant contribution is the development of computational frameworks that integrate diverse experimental data with physical principles to model protein structures and their assemblies. He pioneered comparative protein structure modeling through satisfaction of spatial restraints, implemented in the widely used MODELLER software, and developed the Integrative Modeling Platform (IMP) for determining structures of macromolecular complexes. His methodologies have been instrumental in determining the configurations of complex biological machines including the yeast Nuclear Pore Complex with 550 proteins and the 19S subunit of the 26S proteasome. As of 2022, his research impact is evidenced by approximately 400 publications with nearly 89,000 citations and an impressive H-index of 132, demonstrating the profound influence of his work across structural biology and related fields.
Beyond his technical contributions, Sali has shaped the field through his leadership as an editor of the journal Structure and as an investigator in multiple collaborative initiatives including the Quantitative Biosciences Institute's HIV Accessory/Regulatory Complexes program and the Cancer Cell Map Initiative. His IMP software has catalyzed the creation of PDB-Dev, a specialized archive for integrative structures within the worldwide Protein Data Bank. Sali continues to expand the frontiers of computational structural biology by developing approaches for mapping biomolecular networks and creating spatiotemporal models of cellular neighborhoods. His ongoing research represents the cutting edge of integrative structural biology, bridging computational methods with experimental data to illuminate the molecular machinery of life at unprecedented scales.
