Dr. James Briggs’ research is focused in the highly interdisciplinary and collaborative area of computational chemistry/biochemistry. He develops and applies computational methods to problems of chemical and biochemical interest. His research falls into two general categories: computer-aided inhibitor design/discovery and computational biophysics. Briggs’ main target areas in the inhibitor/ligand area are: liver X receptor, calcium channel proteins, Rho kinase 1 (heart disease), PTEN (cancer), PTEN/5HTC2C (addiction control), BCL2 (cancer), gluconeogenesis and glucose uptake (cancer); those for the computational biophysics area include protein-ligand binding, cholera toxin, biofilm control, RNA structure prediction, protein electrostatics and pKa predictions, and identification of protein/enzyme function from structure only.