My 14 years as a Senior Design Engineer for NASA led to my chairmanship of the Space Shuttle Ascent Guidance, Navigation, and Control technical panel and was the foundation for my redesign of the Shuttle Digital Autopilot for the launch of the NASA Chandra X-ray Telescope. I developed the massively parallel and distributed Monte Carlo (before Big Data was a fad) for the Orbiter Upgrades trajectory analysis and led the flight software Ascent GN&C requirements changes for the OI-26x onboard flight software. I was a lead developer and manager for the autonomous flight manager project for abort safety software in the Space Launch Initiative program and the X38 spacecraft. Now, as a research scientist, I seek to use the common mathematical foundations of engineering and biophysics to analyze the chemical environments that endow macro-molecules their function and then impinge on that function through drug design.
I use Big Data and Computational Scale to advance NMR, computational chemistry, docking, and molecular simulations to modulate molecular mechanisms in Integrin, SYK and AKAP signaling. I endeavor to develop novel therapeutics with guidelines for how to apply nature's rules to the synthesis of compounds to validate structure/function relationships of new therapeutics leads. My lab has discovered a therapeutic candidate for COVID-19 treatment and endeavors to develop preclinical data to support our patent: Small molecules that treat or prevent viral infections; BK McConnell, AR Alcaraz, JW Craft, RJ Schwartz - US Patent App. 18/111,210, 2023.
