Thomas Grant awarded Chancellor’s Horizon Award for Faculty Research and Scholarship

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Thomas D. Grant, PhD, assistant professor of structural biology in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo, has been awarded the Chancellor’s Horizon Award for Faculty Research and Scholarship.

Now in its second year, the Horizon Award honors early-career tenured and tenure-track faculty whose scholarly or creative activities have already achieved significant recognition and, crucially, hold strong promise for field-defining impact in the future.

One of 10 faculty members across the 64 campuses of the SUNY system to receive the award, Grant conducts research that creates new paradigms for structure-based drug design and for investigating molecular mechanisms of disease with broad biomedical applications. His work will one day allow drugs to be designed for individual patients based on their own genetics.

“Dr. Grant’s work exemplifies how the application of artificial intelligence is transforming science, accelerating our understanding of protein structure and translating those insights into treatments that can benefit people everywhere,” says Allison Brashear, MD, vice president for health sciences and dean of the Jacobs School. “This award recognizes his remarkable achievements to date and the profound impact his work will have on the future of health care.”

Grant’s work is described as revolutionizing the field of structural biology because it allows for proteins to be studied in their natural environment. To accomplish this, he employs a technique called SWAXS (small- and wide-angle X-ray scattering) in combination with computational AI tools.

He created SWAXSFold, an AI model he developed that leverages the computing capacity of Empire AI, the $500 million New York State-based research consortium advancing artificial intelligence for the public good. Empire AI’s computing center, located at UB, is a major resource for the researchers.

His SWAXSFold platform represents the first AI architecture that enables structure prediction of actual solution conformations rather than theoretical models. This advance has been described not as an incremental improvement but rather as a paradigm shift.

Grant and his colleagues are also developing tools that will help researchers understand how disease-causing mutations change protein structure.

His current research, funded by a $2.18 million National Institutes of Health grant, is focused on developing two innovations that extract unprecedented atomic-level information from SWAXS data.

Grant has published many groundbreaking papers, including one in Nature Methods describing the algorithm he developed that enables 3D density reconstruction directly from solution data. With more than 200 citations, this algorithm has been adopted at many synchrotron facilities worldwide and inspired a multimillion-dollar commercial instrument by Rigaku Corporation.

In addition to chairing numerous conference committees worldwide in scientific organizations focused on protein-structure determination, Grant mentors graduate students and postdoctoral associates in structural biology.

He is also involved in developing new majors at UB that will focus on the connections between AI and the health sciences.

After graduating from UB in 2013 with his doctorate in structural and computational biology, Grant was a postdoctoral research associate at the Hauptman-Woodward Institute, which is now part of UB. He then came back to UB as a research scientist with BioXFEL, a National Science Foundation-funded center focused on developing advanced imaging techniques for critical biological processes. He earned his undergraduate degree in mathematical physics from UB.

A Western New York native, Grant currently resides in Clarence, New York.