Samanta Makurat

Samanta Makurat comes from the beautiful city of Gdansk in Poland, where she is making her PhD degree in Chemistry. Her main field is computational chemistry, and as a theoretical part of Biological Sensitizers Laboratory team is responsible for supporting the experimental group with calculations on new potential sensitizers and more recently – reaction paths leading to DNA damage, mostly with the use of DFT and hybrid (ONIOM) methods with the use of Gaussian package (OMG she is so smart!).

You might not know that, but in Gdansk there is a beautiful beach. You can even enjoy sunrise with your friends there!

In the future, as a topic for her PhD study she wants to model the enzyme reactions – namely kinases and polymerases with the use of Molecular Dynamics, which is why the project she got assigned to was just tailor-made for her.

As a Summer of HPC student assigned with Molecular Dynamics simulation of the E545K PI3Ka mutant (nothing with UFO I guess) Samanta is going to a dream destination for the whole summer – Athens, where besides while working hard in the Biomedical Research Foundation Academy of Athens ,  she plans to sleep at the beach (which is probably impossible in Poland), drink Greek wine and enjoy all the beautiful places around learn how to set up perform and analyze MD simulations.

Samanta on the run. Apparently enjoying it very much.

But it’s not only work she is busy in her life with. What she enjoys the most in her life is probably spending time with her friends (typical Polish, if you know what I mean) and family (which, also typical Polish – is huge!). She pretends to like running, but her favorite activity is probably sitting on a sofa with a good book in her left hand, hot chocolate in her right hand and music in the headphones. Likes to consider herself a traveler and a mountain lover, but haven’t even seen all the European capital cities and doesn’t know how to ski – both of these are included in her plan for this year.