Computational scientist · London, UK

Exploring molecules.
Building tools.
Discovering materials.

I’m a postdoctoral researcher at King’s College London, working at the intersection of atomistic simulation, scientific software and AI for science.

Zhiwen Zhong
Zhiwen Zhong, PhDKing’s College London
Atomistic simulationScientific softwareAI for science

01 / Bio

From molecular mechanisms to materials discovery.

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Martin-Martinez Lab at King’s College London, working with Dr Francisco J. Martin-Martinez on computational methods for polymer and biomaterial discovery.

I completed my PhD in Computational Physics at King’s, supervised by Prof. Christian D. Lorenz and Prof. Martin B. Ulmschneider. My doctoral research used multiscale molecular simulations to investigate membrane-protein structure, dynamics and disease-associated mechanisms.

My background also includes an MSc in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Science and Technology of China and a BSc from Anhui University.

02 / Research

Current directions

Connecting molecular insight
with reproducible computation.

01

Molecular & materials simulation

Using atomistic and coarse-grained molecular dynamics to investigate proteins, polymers and biomaterials, and connect molecular behaviour to structure and properties.

02

Scientific software & workflows

Developing automated, reproducible workflows for molecular construction, force-field parameterisation, high-throughput simulation and trajectory analysis on HPC systems.

03

AI for materials discovery

Working towards platforms that connect molecular dynamics, DFT-generated data, machine-learning interatomic potentials and active learning for materials discovery.

03 / Featured project

iPHASimulator

In development

An automated molecular simulation workflow for polyhydroxyalkanoate materials discovery.

The project is evolving from a simulation pipeline into a broader materials-discovery platform, with molecular construction, simulation preparation, high-throughput execution and analysis at its core.

Explore my GitHub
01

Construct

Polymer structures
Force-field parameters

02

Simulate

Molecular dynamics
HPC workflows

03

Analyse

Trajectories
Molecular descriptors

04 / Publications

Selected work

Molecular mechanisms,
structural biology & simulation.

  1. 2024
  2. 2021

    Crystal Structure of the PDZ4 Domain of MAGI2 in Complex with PBM of ARMS Reveals a Canonical PDZ Recognition Mode

    Yanshen Zhang, Zhiwen Zhong, Jin Ye and Chao Wang

    Neurochemistry International · Co-first author

  3. 2018

    The Protective Effects of Selenium-Enriched Spirulina platensis on Chronic Alcohol-Induced Liver Injury in Mice

    Xiang Fu, Zhiwen Zhong, Feng Hu, Yi Zhang, Chunxia Li, Peng Yan, Lixue Feng, Jinglian Shen and Bei Huang

    Food & Function · Co-first author

05 / Toolkit

Tools behind
the research.

Programming & scientific computing

Python · Bash · Git · Linux · HPC · SLURM

Molecular simulation & analysis

GROMACS · OpenMM · MDAnalysis · AmberTools · PyMOL · VMD

Data & machine learning

NumPy · Pandas · Matplotlib · scikit-learn

06 / Connect

Let’s talk science.

My professional interests span computational materials discovery, scientific machine learning and research software engineering.