Our Crowdfunding Groups
The Problem
According to the CDC, as of 2020 almost 6 million Americans suffer from Alzhiemer’s disease. Alzhiemer’s disease, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, and many other neurodegenerative disorders are caused by the misfolding of proteins. Many of these diseases don't have a cure due to our current lack of understanding in the field of protein folding. Proteins fold into complex three-dimensional patterns, and predicting the structure of proteins is challenging. The complexity and asymmetry of how proteins fold, coupled with the numerous possible structural permutations, makes modeling proteins extremely computationally intensive. However, quantum systems and their significant computing power show promise in solving the protein folding problem.
Our Mission
Our research focuses on using quantum computing to study how proteins fold, and more importantly how they misfold, in order to better understand neurodegenerative disorders. Current protein models are limited to a small chain of amino acids, and cannot predict other factors such as stability or thermodynamic properties. Our goal is to create protein folding algorithms to test if quantum computing can outperform classical machine learning algorithms such as AlphaFold. Within quantum computing, we hope to determine whether qubits or qudits are more efficacious for this application.
About Us
We are Team ASQ, an undergraduate research team in the Gemstone Honors College at the University of Maryland. The eleven students that make up our team belong to a diverse set of majors including physics, computer science, and engineering. As a team, we are united by our desire to expand upon the fields of quantum computing and protein modeling, in order to save lives. The team formed in Spring 2022 and will continue to do research until our thesis defense in April 2025. We are grateful to have Dr. Mohammad Hafezi, an accomplished researcher in quantum information processing and sensing, as our mentor, and our remarkable librarian, Jordan S. Sly.
Why We Need Your Help
Since we’re an undergraduate research team, we lack the resources and funding to move forward in our research. To make headway in finding the best model for protein folding and achieve patientless drug testing, we need your support. We need funding for lab equipment, materials, and computation time on IBM and AWS computers. Any donation of any size would be incredibly beneficial for our research. Thank you for your support, and we are excited to show you how our research will do good for the world.
Contact Us
Website: https://markgouzoulis.wixsite.com/gemstone-team-asq
Email: asqgems2025@gmail.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/asqgems2025
Gifts in support of the University of Maryland are accepted and managed by the University of Maryland College Park Foundation, Inc., an affiliated 501(c)(3) organization authorized by the Board of Regents. Contributions to the University of Maryland are tax deductible as allowed by law. Please see your tax advisor for details.
Your kind contribution will help us purchase IBM Qiskit tokens to perform millions of computations.
Your kind contribution will help us purchase AWS Sage-maker compute tokens to completely train a heavy-duty production-level multicomputer machine learning model.
Your kind contribution will help us purchase liquid nitrogen for cooling down our quantum system.
Your kind contribution will help us purchase qudit hardware needed to construct a quantum computer with qudits.