Benjamin Samudio

Background

About Benjamin Samudio

I am passionate about educational enrichment, discovering medicine, and making both accessible and equitable. I am a computer-aided drug design (CADD) scientist with over five years of experience applying CADD in government, academic, and industrial/biotech settings. My work has involved targets in oncology, infectious diseases, and metabolic disorders, for example, spanning all stages of early drug discovery. I have extensive experience applying computer programming and industry-standard software to solve diverse challenges in drug discovery and development as a member of multi-functional teams. A copy of my current curriculum vitae may be found in the "Featured" section below. First and foremost, I am a very proud and grateful husband and father. Helping to build a world in which effective and safe medicines are readily available to those who need them is the reality I work towards. One project that I am particularly excited about and exemplifies my passion is Crowdsourced Medical Innovation (CMI, formerly StudentsGiveHope.org), hosted by the Hope Shared Foundation, which is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit that a fellow graduate student and I established in 2014. More details can be found in the "Featured" section below. Much kindness has been bestowed on me, so it is an honor to pay this forward by mentoring students. If you would like to partner towards providing students with biomedical mentoring, please reach out to me via the contact information background profile image above is an augmented reality view, as seen through a smartphone, of the SARS-CoV-1 main protease active site, with a student-designed potential inhibitor bound to it, overlaid unto a cardboard topographical model. The colors represent pharmacophores. The augmented reality view was made possible by A-Frame, VMD, and Amazon AWS. This enabled students to design potential inhibitors by piecing together plastic molecule kits inside the cardboard model, uploading their designs to a virtual model, and receiving feedback via augmented reality and an accompanying "therapeutics report card" with a "therapeutics GPA." Through this project, students learned chemistry while building their resumes and contributing to actual, open-access, and freely available biomedical research.