Rate My Professor Carmen Domene

Professor Carmen Domene is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Bath. She carries out research in computational and physical chemistry, applying principles from quantum mechanics and statistical thermodynamics to model molecular phenomena through computer simulations and modelling. Her research interests include biophysics, membrane proteins, lipids, and enzymes. She employs techniques such as ab initio electronic structure calculations, all-atom and coarse-grained classical molecular dynamics simulations, Car-Parrinello and Born-Oppenheimer ab initio molecular dynamics, free energy calculations, and enhanced sampling methods including umbrella sampling, metadynamics, and adaptive biasing force. Domene collaborates with experimental researchers to interpret results and gain a microscopic understanding of biochemical and biophysical processes at the molecular level. Her studies focus on ion channels and integral membrane proteins, which are crucial for sensing heat, cold, touch, pain, taste, and other sensations, contributing to understanding human health, disease, and drug development.

Domene obtained her Licenciatura en Química from the Universidad de Sevilla in 1995, postgraduate courses in Physical Chemistry from the same university in 1997, a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Exeter awarded in 2001, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice from King's College London in 2014. Her career includes periods at the University of Pennsylvania in the group of Michael Klein, at ETH Zurich in the group of Michele Parrinello, a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in the Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford, and Reader in the Department of Chemistry at King's College London from 2012 to 2017. She served as Visiting Research Academic at the University of Oxford from 2012 to 2023. Domene has received the 2023 Royal Society of Chemistry Corday-Morgan Prize for her contributions to computational chemistry, the 2020 Loew Award from the International Society of Quantum Biology and Pharmacology, a 2006 EMBO Fellowship, and the 2005 JWT Jones Travelling Fellowship from the Royal Society of Chemistry. Key publications include 'Atomistic Insights into Anomeric and Stereochemical Effects on Glucose Transport by GLUTs' (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2026), 'Mechanistic Insights into Dioxygen Transport Routes in the PHD2 Oxygenase from Long-Timescale Simulations' (Biochemistry, 2026), 'Enhanced Sampling and Free Energy Calculations in Protein Simulations' (Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, 2026), and she edited 'Computational Biophysics of Membrane Proteins' (2016). Her research has garnered over 5,500 citations.