Dr. Robert Powers is currently a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Dr. Powers received his BA in Chemistry from Rutgers University in 1984 and completed his Ph.D. in chemistry at Purdue University in 1989. His postdoctoral work was with Drs. G. Marius Clore and Angela Gronenborn at the National Institutes of Health laboratory of Chemical Physics. After completing his post-doctoral IRTA fellowship, Dr. Powers worked in the pharmaceutical industry for ten years. In 1992, he joined American Cyanamid which was acquired by AHP in 1994 followed by a merger with Genetics Institute in 1998 to form Wyeth. Dr. Powers was an Associate Director for the Protein NMR group before arriving at UNL in 2003. Dr. Powers research specializes in the development of techniques using NMR to screen for new drug leads, to monitor in cell drug and protein activity, to assign protein functions. Dr. Powers has developed NMR and MS metabolomics technique and has implemented the use of dendograms to interpret PCA and OPLS clustering patterns, the use of metabolomic networks to monitor carbon flow through the metabolome, and the MVAPACK data-handling software. He has applied this platform to studies related to Pancreatic Cancer, Parkinson's Disease, Multiple Sceloris, infectious diseases, and drug discovery. He has also developed FAST-NMR, functional annotation screening technology using NMR, the CPASS, comparison of protein active site structures (CPASS) database and software, and the PROFESS database for annotating functionally uncharacterized proteins. He has also used NMR to solve over two dozen protein and protein-ligand structures, and developed the MS/NMR and Multi-Step NMR techniques for high-throughput ligand affinity screens.Published >100 manuscripts, 4 book chapters, and 9 patents on NMR structural biology and drug discoverySpecialties: NMR Spectroscopy, Structural Biology, Functional Genomics, NMR metabolomics, Bioinformatics, Drug Discovery,