Sarah Rauscher receives national Early Career Researcher Award for advancements in computational biophysics
Sarah Rauscher, Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Research in the Department of Chemical and Physical Sciences, has been named the recipient of the 2025 Early Career Researcher Award by the Biophysical Society of Canada (BSC).
The award celebrates emerging leaders who have made outstanding contributions to the field of biophysics in Canada. For Prof. Rauscher, the recognition reflects years of collaborative effort.
“I’m very happy to receive this honour,” says Rauscher, who studies protein structure and dynamics. “I feel the award belongs both to me and to all the lab members — the undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows — who have worked with me throughout the eight years I’ve been a faculty member at U of T.”
At the Rauscher Lab, her team uses advanced computing methods to study the molecular structures of disordered proteins — proteins whose structure changes depending on their environment. Mutations in these proteins are at the root of many diseases; by understanding the structure of the proteins involved at a molecular level, she explains, researchers will be able to design new therapies.
Because these proteins cannot be studied through experiments alone, Rauscher’s work complements traditional approaches with atomistic molecular dynamics simulations, which provide high-resolution insights into how proteins move and adopt shapes that enable their function. By looking at proteins as molecular machines, Rauscher aims to develop a blueprint for how they work.
“If the goal is to design or improve drugs that target proteins of interest, we need excellent descriptions of their structure, dynamics, and function,” she points out. “We’re working on a general set of methods to describe protein motion and protein disorder.”
Rauscher says diverse funding sources have been critical to her work, including support from NSERC, the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, and internal seed grants, which provided essential computing resources and enabled her lab’s success.
She will receive the award in May 2026 at the Biophysical Society of Canada Annual Meeting in Winnipeg and looks forward to celebrating the contributions of her trainees. Their work and dedication, she says, are essential to the research being conducted in the Rauscher Lab.
“This is the kind of achievement that’s a group effort. It’s not something you achieve alone.”
