Judith C. Hempel, Ph.D.

In June 2002, Dr. Hempel joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin as the Assistant Chair/Associate Director of the Department of Biomedical Engineering.  Previously, Dr. Hempel was the Associate Director of the UCSF Molecular Design Institute and Director of the Corporate Scholars Program.   She received her Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin and taught at Swarthmore College before joining SmithKline in 1980 as a founding member of the Computer Aided Molecular Design group.   A member of the scientific staff at the molecular computation software company Biosym Technologies /MSI from 1988-1996, she joined the UCSF Molecular Design Institute in 1996.  Her research interests include the use of pharmacophore hypotheses in peptidomimetic design (Eur. J. Med. Chem., 30 (1995) 391-5); effects of solvation free energy (Biopolymers, 36 (1995) 283-301); optimization and visualization of molecular diversity (Mol. Diversity, 2 (1996) 64-74); and approaches to protein folding/threading guided by experimental restraints (PNAS, 97 (2000) 5802-5806).  She  is an author of the patent for Teveten, the angiotensin II receptor antagonist drug for hypertension originally developed by SmithKline. 

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