2024 Tailor Made Force Fields for Drug Design & Development Intern

AbbVie's mission is to discover and deliver innovative medicines and solutions that solve serious health issues today and address the medical challenges of tomorrow. We strive to have a remarkable impact on people's lives across several key therapeutic areas – immunology, oncology, neuroscience, and eye care – and products and services in our Allergan Aesthetics portfolio. For more information about AbbVie, please visit us at www.abbvie.com. Follow @abbvie on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.

2024 Tailor Made Force Fields for Drug Design & Development Intern Overview

Envision spending your summer working with energetic colleagues and inspirational leaders, all while gaining world-class experience in one of the most dynamic organizations in the pharmaceutical industry. This is a reality for AbbVie Interns.

This internship opportunity is in the Molecular Profiling and Drug Delivery (MPDD) group within the Small Molecule CMC organization. MPDD is accountable for a broad range of deliverables across various stages of drug discovery and development. During lead optimization and through candidate selection, MPDD scientists utilize state of the art automation and computational tools supported by expertise in biopharmaceutics, drug delivery, and solid-state chemistry to collaboratively progress candidates with higher probability of success into development and advise clinical formulation strategy. Computational chemists within AbbVie's MPDD organization work collaboratively with other functions within Development Sciences and Discovery across three focus areas; Molecular Design, Material Design, and Structural determinants of absorption towards the vision to model low dose compounds with optimal potency, clearance, permeability, and solubility before synthesizing them and atomistic level understanding of materials properties and performance.   Specifically, the individual will be responsible for developing and assessing the application of novel classical force fields for both predicting molecular properties and capturing structural determinants of such properties through molecular simulations.  

Key responsibilities include:

• Development and benchmarking of novel classical force fields for molecular simulations. 
• Benchmarking performance of force fields for classical simulations including free energy perturbation, molecular dynamics, and enhanced molecular dynamics for drug design.
• Developing python code and scripts to automate these simulations with custom built force fields.

Minimum Qualifications  

• Currently enrolled in university, pursuing a Ph.D. in any discipline related, but not limited to computational/theoretical chemistry, chemical engineering, biophysics, or computer science.
• Returning to university for at least one semester and graduating within one-year post internship.
• Advanced user of GPU-enabled open-source molecular (MD) packages such as GROMACS or OpenMM and deep understanding of concepts behind classical force fields and free energy calculations.
• Proficient in running and analyzing simulations on high performance computing (HPC) clusters.
• Well versed in writing code and scripts in either Python or C++.
• Demonstrate oral/written communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications 

• Expected graduation date between December 2024 – July 2025.
• Hands on experience developing or parameterizing classical force fields for MD simulations.
• Experience developing and coding novel free energy calculation or enhanced MD algorithms into open-source MD software such as GROMACS or OpenMM.
• Experience using classical molecular simulation tools for drug design.
• Deep understanding of concepts for enhanced MD simulations.

Benefits and Amenities

• Competitive pay.
• Relocation support for eligible students.
• Opportunity to connect with AbbVie leaders and scientists.
• Exposure to AbbVie’s broad project portfolio and opportunity to experience the interface between Discovery and CMC Development.

Equal Employment Opportunity
At AbbVie, we value bringing together individuals from diverse backgrounds to develop new and innovative solutions for patients. As an equal opportunity employer, we do not discriminate on basis of race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy), physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, protected veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.

Applicable only to applicants applying to a position in any location with pay disclosure requirements under state or local law: ​

• The compensation range described below is the range of possible base pay compensation that the Company believes in good faith it will pay for this role at the time of this posting based on the job grade for this position. Individual compensation paid within this range will depend on many factors including geographic location, and we may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range. This range may be modified in the future.​

Note: No amount of pay is considered to be wages or compensation until such amount is earned, vested, and determinable. The amount and availability of any bonus, commission, incentive, benefits, or any other form of compensation and benefits that are allocable to a particular employee remains in the Company's sole and absolute discretion unless and until paid and may be modified at the Company’s sole and absolute discretion, consistent with applicable law.

AbbVie is committed to operating with integrity, driving innovation, transforming lives, serving our community and embracing diversity and inclusion.  It is AbbVie’s policy to employ qualified persons of the greatest ability without discrimination against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy), physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, status as a protected veteran, or any other legally protected group status.