Fall-Spring Session 25

About The Professors

• Igor Tsigelny, Ph.D.

  Igor F. Tsigelny is a Research Professor at the Department of Neurosciences of UC San Diego, having long time collaboration with San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Moores Cancer Center,. He is a world-known expert in structural biology, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, using AI for drug design and treatment, and structure-based drug design. He has a Ph. D. from the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the University of California in the laboratory of Susan S. Taylor from 1992–1995. Dr. Tsigelny is the author of over 200 papers in scientific journals including the Nature and Science groups of journals, and Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences of the USA. He had published and edited 4 scientific books. The book “Protein Structure Prediction: Bioinformatic Approach” that he edited, has been called “The Bible of all current prediction techniques” by BioPlanet Bioinformatics Forums. He is a member of editorial boards of over 10 scientific journals. He has around 15 existing and pending patents. Two drug-candidates developed by Dr. Tsigelny for treatment of Parkinson’s disease and brain cancer are licensed by UCSD to pharmaceutical companies and are in various stages of development His computational study of molecular mechanisms of Parkinson’s disease has been included in the US Department of Energy publication “Decade of Discovery” where the best computational studies of the decade 1999–2009 have been described. The latest his studies are devoted to finding treatment for COVID-19. He published six articles in 2020–2022 devoted to this topic. Ten of theoretically predicted COVID-19 drugs are in various experimental and clinical studies. He successfully mentored the UCSD programs for undergraduate and high-school students for several years.

• Valentina Kouznetsova, Ph.D.

  Valentina Kouznetsova is a Research Professor at UCSD (San Diego Supercomputer Center). She studies molecular mechanisms of various diseases including cancer, diabetes, and neurological disorders. Her work includes development of metabolic, genetic, and combined biomarkers for early diagnostics and distinction of different types and stages of a disease; development of inhibitors of signaling and metabolic pathways involved in a disease; protein modeling; and molecular simulations. She is an expert in computational drug design. She developed drugs for treatment of Parkinson’s disease and glioblastoma that were licensed from UCSD and are in development in industry. She is an author of more than 50 scientific papers including publications in Nature and Science series of journals, 3 books, 8 book chapters, and 13 patents. Her article Locating Blood Vessels in Retinal Images by Piecewise Threshold Probing of a Matched Filter Response exceeded the 2000 citations. She is a mentor of UCSD programs for high-school students, who participate in scientific conferences and are co-authors of several research papers. Many of her former mentees currently are enrolled in the best universities including Stanford, Harvard, Brown, Yale universities, MIT and Caltech institutes, and others. Dr. Kouznetsova obtained her Ph.D. degree in Technical Cybernetics and Information Theory from the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Her book “Self-Organization in Technical Systems” published in XX century was one of the first books devoted to the deep learning AI concepts.