Jennifer Kelly Shepphird, PhD

Research Scientist

Jennifer Shepphird joined Tripos in 2001 after working at the biotech company Protein Pathways, where she developed tools to integrate information from the fields of genomics, biochemistry, chemistry and structural biology. Her first five years at Tripos were spent as an application scientist. She helped software users bridge the gap between a theoretical understanding of software capabilities and a practical grasp of achieving reliable information from various workflows. As most application scientists do, she dabbled in a little of everything, but much work was devoted to virtual screening, library design and QSAR. Recently, she joined the Informatics Research Center as a research scientist. Current projects include evaluating docking performance in the presence of constraints from combinatorial core placements, and optimizing docking performance by choosing the best binding site variation for a given ligand class using information from Tuplets

Selected Publications

A marriage made in torsional space: using GALAHAD models to drive pharmacophore multiplet searches, JK Shepphird, RD Clark, J Comput Aided Mol Des., 20:763-71 (2006)

Highly constrained multiple-copy refinement of protein crystal structures, M Pellegrini N Gronbech-Jensen, JA Kelly, GM Pfluegl, TO Yeates, Proteins 29:426-32 (1997)

Reconciliation of the X-ray and NMR structures of the thrombin-binding aptamer d(GGTTGGTGTGGTTGG), JA Kelly, J Feigon, TO Yeates, J Mol.Biol. 256: 417-22 (1996)

Crystallization and preliminary structural studies of neurotrophin-3, JA Kelly, E. Singer, TD Osslund, TO Yeates, Protein Sci 3:982-3 (1994)