Benoît Roux


Benoît Roux, Ph.D., is an Amgen Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at the University of Chicago. He has previously taught at University of Montreal and Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Benoît Roux was a recipient of the 1998 Rutherford Memorial Medal in Chemistry, awarded by the Royal Society of Canada.

Life and career

Roux obtained B.Sc. and M.Sc. in physics from the University of Montreal in 1981 and 1984 respectively. In 1990s he moved across the border to the United States, where he attended Harvard University from which he graduated in 1990. Prior to immigrating to the United States he served at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission from 1991 to 1992 and was a Foreign Research Fellow at the Centre D’Etudes. Since 2005 he serves as a research scientist at the Center for Nanoscale Materials, a department of the Argonne National Laboratory.

Research

His laboratory at the University of Chicago mostly uses theoretical techniques, such as classical molecular dynamics, to understand the functioning of biological systems at the molecular level. His research has investigated structure, dynamics, and the function of biological macromolecular systems such as ion channels, receptors, and protein kinases.
He is a pioneer in the study of membrane proteins using molecular dynamics with explicit phospholipid molecules and solvent.
His laboratory has also developed novel computational methods to improve efficiency and applicability of theoretical investigations to molecular recognition phenomena. His work has bridged theory and experiment in biophysics by employing ever-increasing computational power to further the understanding of the molecular basis of life.

Works

In 1996, he co-authored Biological Membranes: A Molecular Perspective from Computation and Experiment with Kenneth M. Merz.

Honors, Awards, and Fellowships