Biological macromolecules are in general long-chain polymers.
The interactions of polymer chains with themselves and with other polymer chains can confer either fragility or stability on the system as a whole. Penn's Michael Klein and his colleagues are discovering how and why this is so. Klein is the Hepburn Professor of Physical Sciences in the Department of Chemistry. He is also director of Penn's Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter and in charge of the Center for Molecular Modeling . He is the 1999 winner of the prestigious Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics of the American Physical Society.