By Alina Schadwinkel, Spektrum der Wissenschaft Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Heidelberg What the heck is a coronavirus ? How do I protect myself? How safe and effective are the new vaccines – and when will the pandemic finally be over? For more than a year, Sars-CoV-2 has dominated the media. People are demanding information. As quickly as possible, as precisely as possible. Presented neither downplaying nor alarmist. A challenge. Seldom has it been so important to communicate science well as in these times. It is true that the core task of science journalism is to report facts and thus provide orientation, rather than to publish opinions and positions. But today, false reports…

The weighted ensemble (WE) path sampling strategy orchestrates multiple simulations in parallel with rigorous statistical resampling at fixed time intervals to maintain rigorous kinetics. WE simulations can be orders of magnitude more efficient than standard simulations in generating unbiased, atomically detailed pathways for rare events such as large conformational transitions in proteins and protein binding processes. The WE strategy can be applied at any scale with any type of stochastic dynamics engine – from ab initio simulations to cell-scale simulations and beyond. I will present our recent applications of the WE strategy as well as challenges that remain in tackling long-timescale kinetics. Curriculum vitae: Please see: CV_short REGISTRATION: The colloquium is…