Current Postdocs
Zhongyi Wan
Postdoctoral Fellow (07/2024-present)
Zhongyi received his B.S. degree in Chemistry from Peking University in 2018. He received his Ph.D. degree in chemistry from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2024, where he worked with Prof. JR Schmidt on developing models and theories of solid-phase epitaxy in polymorphic complex oxides. Zhongyi started postdoctoral research in the Cui Group since July 2024. As a part of the NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology, he is now investigating the peptide-membrane interaction including permeation and pore formation using machine learning-aided sampling techniques.
Postdoctoral Fellow (03/2025-present)
Sudip received his B.Sc. degree in Chemistry in 2012 and his M.Sc. degree in Physical Chemistry in 2014 from Visva Bharati University, India. He was awarded his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry in 2020 from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), India, where he worked with Prof. S. Balasubramanian on studying the interfacial activation and thermostability of enzymes using molecular dynamics simulations and enhanced sampling techniques. He then joined Prof. Michele Parrinello’s group at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa as a postdoctoral researcher, where he conducted research on enzyme catalysis by integrating machine learning with enhanced sampling. Sudip started his postdoctoral research in Prof. Cui’s Group in March 2025, where he is investigating protein condensate-membrane interactions using machine learning-aided enhanced sampling techniques. Apart from science, Sudip is passionate about literature, arts, music, movies, and theatre.
Postdoctoral Fellow (08/2025-present)
Jiale Shi received his B.S. in Chemistry at Peking University in 2017 and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame in 2022 under the supervision of Prof. Jonathan Whitmer. His doctoral research focused on facilitating the optimal design of new soft materials by integrating AI, molecular simulations, and statistical physics. He also worked on developing and applying advanced sampling methods for free-energy calculations. During his Ph.D., he received the Outstanding Paper Award from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Notre Dame and the Best Poster Award at the Notre Dame–Purdue Soft Matter & Polymers Symposium. From 2022 to 2025, he conducted his first postdoctoral research in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT, working with Prof. Bradley Olsen and Dr. Debra Audus (NIST). His postdoctoral projects focused on developing graph-based and similarity-informed explainable AI methods for polymer search, embedding, and property prediction. He was one of the core research members for the Community Resource for Innovation in Polymer Technology (CRIPT) and received the ACS PMSE Future Faculty Scholar Award and the ACS POLY Big Data Award during this period. In August 2025, he started his second postdoctoral research in Prof. Cui’s group at Boston University, where he is developing non-equilibrium simulation frameworks to investigate the physical properties of lipid nanoparticles for mRNA delivery. He is also developing AI methods to accurately represent the dynamic properties of biomacromolecules and quantitatively calculate pairwise similarity.
Interested in joining the Cui group? Write to QC!