Rate My Professor Zackary Falls

Falls' research specializes in drug discovery and pharmacoinformatics, focusing on the development of algorithms for the Computational Analysis of Novel Drug Opportunities (CANDO) platform, data analytics applied to electronic health records to identify health risks and disparities, and the design of therapeutics for diseases including non-small cell lung cancer, COVID-19, and opioid misuse. He integrates structural bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, and clinical informatics in collaborations addressing biological and clinical challenges with academia and industry. Key research interests encompass addictions, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, biomedical informatics, clinical informatics, computational biology, computational chemistry, computational drug discovery, drug abuse, drug design, genomics and proteomics, infectious disease, proteomics, structural biology, team science, transcriptomics, and translational research. Falls has earned the Sinsheimer Scholar Award in 2024 and the T15 Informatics Training Fellowship Award in 2017, among others from his graduate and undergraduate career. Representative publications include 'Strategies for robust, accurate, and generalizable benchmarking of drug discovery platforms' (Bioinformatics, 2025, with M. Van Norden et al.), 'Deciphering bisphenol A (BPA)-elicited osteoarthritis mechanisms through network toxicology and molecular docking, then de novo generation of novel therapeutic candidates' (BMC Pharmacology & Toxicology, 2025, with S. Xu et al.), 'The implications of APOBEC3-mediated C-to-U RNA editing for human disease' (Communications Biology, 2024, with M. Van Norden et al.), and 'Differences in prescribing patterns of opioid dependence drugs among patients with primary alcohol use problems and opioid use disorders within New York State by social determinant factors, 2005-2018' (Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, 2024, with C.H. Lu et al.). He has presented lectures such as 'Shifting the Drug Discovery Paradigm: Multitarget, Multiscale, and Multisource' at University at Buffalo's Clinical and Translational Therapeutics Seminar Series and Buffalo Protein Science Group in 2025, and at Nazareth University in 2023. Falls contributes to service as Faculty Council Representative since 2024, member of various faculty search committees, the Research Data Working Group since 2025, and Scientific Program Committee Member for AMIA 2026 Amplify. He serves as Review Editor for Frontiers in Chemistry since 2022.