Making Space: Molecules & Biomedical Imaging in Virtual Reality Open Swim

This is a unique opportunity for hands-on experience manipulating molecular structures and biomedical imaging scans in a full Virtual Reality environment. Making Space speaker Meghan McCarthy and her colleague, Phil Cruz, will guide attendees through a “molecular spelunking” journey using UCSF ChimeraX, and will showcase the power of training and education in an immersive environment using the  Enduvo software platform on the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headsets in D. H. Hill Jr. Library’s VR Studio. Phil Cruz, Ph.D., is a Computational Structural Biologist, and Meghan McCarthy, M.S., Ph.D., is Program Lead for 3D Printing and Biovisualization Program at the Office of Cyber Infrastructure and Computational Biology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. Together they represent the NIAID Biovisualization Labs, a new NIAID initiative to enable adoption of emerging and advanced visualization technologies to accelerate discovery. Attendees are encouraged to bring ideas for content they would like to interact. Demonstrations include various viral receptors - influenza, HIV, ebola, and more. Participants may also view different molecules by providing a Protein Data Bank accession code. ~Anonymized~ CT or MRI scan data (.dcm), or molecular structure files (.pdb) may be brought on a flash drive.