Dr. Faruck Morcos
- Associate Professor of Biological Sciences
- Fellow, Cecil H. and Ida Green Professor in Systems Biology Science
The legacy of Cecil H. and Ida Green at The University of Texas at Dallas was to establish in Dallas a world-class cohort of faculty and students in the new domain of integrated interdisciplinary biomedical research. The Cecil Green Estate created the professorship.
“My lab has flourished due to the unique research conditions and excellent colleagues and students at UTD. I have found an amazing collaborative and intellectual environment across disciplines and departments that accelerates discovery and learning for our students.”
Dr. Faruck Morcos’ research is aimed at understanding better — and perhaps exploiting — the role of protein evolution and interactions in living systems as well as their connections to human health and disease. His computational framework and statistical learning models also aid in molecular design and systems biology, with potential applications in drug discovery. The work predicts how changes to a protein’s structure — both changes that are allowed by nature and those that are not — affect the protein’s function.
Morcos is a member of the Center for Systems Biology in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. He and his colleagues are developing new models of sequence evolution as well as models to predict how mutations affect the biological performance of pairs of proteins that have co-evolved to work together. A synergy of these models and state-of-the-art machine-learning approaches has advanced applications in synthetic biology and protein engineering, fields that are aimed at designing new proteins or exploiting existing ones for biotechnology and improved human health.
Morcos investigates how to characterize the enormous sequence space of known protein families as well as potential spaces not yet explored by nature. Using machine-learning methods, this research can forecast mutations in proteins related to virus evolution and the evolution of antibiotic resistance.
Morcos’ interdisciplinary research includes collaborations with physicists, chemists, bioengineers, microbiologists, structural biologists and computer scientists. He also is interested in science dissemination and has worked with high-school, community-college and UT Dallas students to create MoleculeGo, a location-aware, educational mobile app that gamifies the process of learning about molecular biology.
His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, including a Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award, and the National Science Foundation, which in 2019 awarded him a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award.
Morcos earned a Bachelor of Science in electronics and communications engineering from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education in Mexico, and a Master of Science in communications engineering from the Technical University of Munich. He received a Master of Science in applied mathematics and a PhD in computer science and engineering from the University of Notre Dame. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics at the University of California, San Diego and at Rice University before joining the UTD faculty in 2015.