IHES Annual Report 2020 | 39
Robert C. PENNER Mathematics, Theoretical Physics et Biology associate professor, University of California, Los Angeles.
ROBERT C. PENNER's work in structural biology came to fruition during 2020 in two papers introducing new methods predicting antiviral sites of interest, in particular for coronaviruses, based on free energy estimates determined by geometry. This work has attracted international attention, for example in a Scientific American article. He will continue this program going forward, not only in its application to mRNA vaccine targets but more generally across proteomics in a current project with Therese Wu using machine-learning to discover peptides of extreme free energy. Also coming to fruition was a 4-year long project with Igor Frenkel applying techniques developed
over several decades in a generalization of arithmetic motivated by theoretical physics, and this program too will continue going forward. Finally, he is roughly one quarter through writing a monograph straddling math and theoretical physics to be entitled Foundations of Hyperbolic Supergeometry .
SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITY
René Thom Chair
CONFERENCES
France Teichmüller Theory: Classical, Higher, Super and Quantum, Centre International de Rencontres Mathématiques, Marseille (5-9 October) (co-organizer)
Germany Special online colloquium, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, Bonn (25 June) Protein Backbone Free Energy to Discover Sites of Interest for Antiviral Targets (video conference)
United States 11th International Virtual Seminar on Covid 19 Part II, SciTech Central, Walnut (16 December) Antiviral Targets via Geometry (video conference)
PUBLICATIONS
With A. Minarsky, N. Morozova, C. Soulé and Y. Wang Model of Morphogenesis J. Comput. Biol. 27(9), 1373-1383 (2020).
Backbone Free Energy Estimator Applied to Viral Glycoproteins J. Comput. Biol. 27(10), 1495-1508 (2020).
Conserved High Free Energy Sites in Human Coronavirus Spike Glycoprotein Backbones J. Comput. Biol. 27(11), 1622-1630 (2020).
Ups and Downs Mathematics Online First Collections, Springer, Cham. DOI: 10.1007/16618_2020_13.
With I. Frenkel Sketch of a Program for Universal Automorphic Functions to Capture Monstrous Moonshine Prepublication arXiv: 2012.14220.
Topology and K Theory: Lectures by Daniel Quillen Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Springer-Verlag 2262 (2020).