Proceedings of the 34th IUPAP Conference on Computational Physics: CCP2023, August 4-8, Kobe, Japan

Yuko Okamoto is a professor emeritus at Nagoya University. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Physics from Brown University in 1979 as a Grew Foundation Scholar and his Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University in 1984. After his postdoctoral work at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, he joined Nara Women’s University in 1986 as an assistant professor and was later promoted to an associate professor, serving there until 1995. He then moved to the Institute for Molecular Science and The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, SOKENDAI, in a joint appointment as an associate professor. He then moved to Nagoya University as a professor of biophysics in 2005 and served in the position for 17 years. Since 2022, he has been a professor emeritus, an invited faculty at the Information Technology Center and a specially appointed professor at the Global Engagement Center, Nagoya University. He has also served as a senior visiting scientist at RIKEN. His research has focused on the development of enhanced sampling methods in molecular simulations, including replica-exchange molecular dynamics and other generalized-ensemble algorithms, and their applications to problems in computational physics, chemistry, and biology such as protein folding and misfolding, ligand binding, and the prediction of three-dimensional structures of molecules.