Technology

West Virginia Teen Wins $25,000 Davidson Scholarship for AI‑Accelerated Drug Discovery Research

By TOI Science Desk

A 17‑year‑old Indian‑American student from Morgantown, West Virginia, has been named a 2026 Davidson Fellow and awarded a $25,000 scholarship for developing an artificial‑intelligence method that speeds up molecular simulations. Pavan Subramani, a senior at Morgantown High School, created a technique that combines generative diffusion models with molecular dynamics simulations to study protein motion and drug interactions. In tests, his method sampled key molecular configurations 68 times more efficiently than conventional molecular dynamics for a specific measure of sampling efficiency. A related approach also reached equilibrium ligand‑binding populations more than four times faster than an existing technique. Subramani’s project, titled “The Hybridization of Generative Diffusion Models with Molecular Dynamics Simulations: A Novel Method to Accelerate Drug Discovery,” addresses the challenge of computationally expensive simulations that struggle to capture rare molecular events. He developed diffusion‑hybridized molecular dynamics (dhMD) and diffusion‑hybridized BLUES (dhBLUES), integrating AI‑generated proposals with a Metropolis‑Hastings acceptance criterion to preserve statistical validity. The work could enable faster evaluation of drug candidates and make advanced simulation techniques more accessible to laboratories without extensive computing resources. Subramani has also earned a third‑place Grand Award in Chemistry at the International Science and Engineering Fair, participated in MIT’s Research Science Institute, and founded The Substance Safety Project, a nonprofit that has raised more than $10,000, distributed 750 drug disposal packets, and conducted workshops for over 1,500 people. He plans to major in chemistry or applied physics and continue research in computational chemistry and biophysics to advance human health through drug discovery. He said the scholarship “recognizes that the research I am doing is valuable and encourages me to continue scientific research.”