CCNY Associate Professor Daniel Keedy is the recipient of a 2026 Early CAREER Award from the NSF.
Daniel Keedy, associate professor in The City College of New York’s Division of Science and Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, is the winner of a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (NSF CAREER) Award. Covering five years, the $948,848 award is for his research, entitled “New routes to designing dynamic protein structures,” that entails the use of artificial intelligence.
NSF CAREER Awards are one of the nation’s highest honors for early-career scientists. They recognize and provide funding to exceptional researchers who are conducting innovative research at the frontiers of science, engineering, and technology while also demonstrating leadership through education, outreach, and service.
Keedy, who is affiliated with the Structural Biology Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) located on the CCNY campus, is applying artificial intelligence to improve the design of proteins. Designed proteins could someday help detect disease, deliver drugs, produce clean fuels, or neutralize toxins, but they still fall short of the abilities of natural proteins. Keedy’s project studies how proteins move and uses AI to design proteins that function more like those found in nature.
“The grant is about using protein design to figure out how natural proteins work, in particular how the right structural motions help them work correctly,” said Keedy. “It also has an educational component, of which a big part is having undergraduate students in my biochemistry course at CCNY do group-based active-learning projects in which they design new proteins, vote, and have them tested in my lab by previous students from the course.”
In addition to the ASRC, Keedy is also affiliated with the Ph.D. Programs in Biochemistry, Biology, and Chemistry at the Graduate Center, CUNY; and heads the eponymous Keedy Lab. It combines computation and experiments to reveal alternative protein conformations and explore how they underlie dynamic functions such as catalysis, ligand binding, and allosteric regulation.
Click here to read more about Keedy.
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