Professor Thayer’s research interest is computational molecular biophysics applied to understanding biological molecules.  Recently her lab has developed two new techniques for studying signaling in proteins: Molecular Dynamics based Markov State Models and Molecular Dynamics based sector analysis and machine learning/AI.  Taken together, the methods identify the important residues in a molecule, and describe the energetic landscape of the system.  This information is being used to develop new therapeutic drugs for cancer working to target key residues in the molecule to restore native functionality to p53, a key protein implicated in human cancer. The methods hold promise to create new medicines for currently incurable diseases by virtue of tackling the problem from this new perspective.

Prof. Thayer received her Bachelor’s Degree from Regis College just outside of Boston, MA in 1999. She then completed her Ph.D. at Wesleyan University in computational chemistry in 2004. Subsequently she continued learning computational techniques in a series of postdocs at Northwestern University, University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  She held faculty positions at Vassar College, Assumption College, and Skidmore prior to joining the faculty at Wesleyan in 2016.