LI High School Senior Chosen For Coronavirus Research Program

EASTPORT, NY — An Eastport-South Manor Junior-Senior High School senior has been chosen into a prestigious program aimed at studying the coronavirus.

Christopher Jannotta has been accepted into the 2020 Brookhaven National Laboratory High School Research Program; he was among 40 students out of approximately 250 applicants to be accepted, the district said.

Chris has been paired with Dr. Hubertus van Dam from the Computational Science Initiative at BNL and will be working with van Dam's team to help with the COVID-19 effort, the district said.

The project involves docking studies that rely on a simple model of how drugs function; the assumption is that the spike protein of the coronavirus has a pocket, a regulatory site, in which a small molecule — or drug — can bind much like the way a key fits into a lock, district officials said.

"The idea is that if you find the right 'key' you can shut the protein down. As part of his study of the virus Chris will also be using molecular dynamics to study how a drug candidate disables a protein," the district said in a release, adding that the research involves an understanding of protein structure and kinetics.

"Chris will be in a unique situation as a high school graduate working at the forefront of one of the greatest health problems of the modern age," the district said. "Due to current social distancing and minimum safe operation at BNL, Chris will be working remotely along with other members of Dr. van Dam’s team. Chris was selected to be a member of this team due to his intuitive computational skills, his academic performance and his experience in the Protein Crystallography Collaboration in the Student Partnerships for Advanced Research and Knowledge, or SPARK, program at BNL."

This article originally appeared on the Center Moriches-Eastport Patch