Texas A&M biochemistry student earns prestigious national research honor
Dimitris Kalafatis '27 named Barry Goldwater Scholar for computational mapping of protein interactions
Dimitris Kalafatis ’27, an undergraduate student in the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, has been named a 2026 Barry Goldwater Scholar. The award is among the most prestigious undergraduate research honors in the nation.
Kalafatis was named a Goldwater Scholar for developing a computational program to map how proteins interact with each other and with metals inside the human body, research that could lead to new drug targets and more accessible therapies for rare diseases.
The scholarship, which provides up to $7,500 per year toward tuition, fees, books and room and board, is awarded to fewer than 450 students annually from a pool of more than 5,000 nominated nationwide.
Established by Congress in 1986 to honor U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Goldwater Scholarship is the premier award for undergraduate researchers pursuing careers in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering. Past recipients have gone on to earn Rhodes Scholarships, Churchill Scholarships and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, among other distinguished honors.
How a love of math led to leading-edge biochemistry research
Kalafatis, a junior from Katy, was drawn to Texas A&M University by the College’s strong biochemistry program and its world-class research infrastructure.
He started on a pre‑med track but quickly shifted course after joining the lab of his faculty mentor, Vishal Gohil, Ph.D., a professor and Chancellor EDGES Fellow in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, where he got hooked on a protein function problem he could not stop thinking about.
“I found a project that was really cool and really mathy, two things I love,” he said. “I decided, oh, actually I think this is what I want to do.”
Kalafatis’ work in the Gohil lab focused on understanding how the human body’s smallest machines, proteins, keep cells alive and functioning. Specifically, the lab studies how proteins in mitochondria — the powerhouse of the cell — collaborate to produce biological energy. Mitochondria contain roughly 1,000 proteins, and scientists do not fully understand what many of these proteins do. These knowledge gaps have hindered their ability to understand how mitochondria malfunction and lead to disease.
Kalafatis thinks of proteins as the workers inside every cell, each one with a specific job. But most of them cannot do that job alone. Many proteins interact with each other and some need metals like copper or zinc, the same minerals seen on nutrition fact labels, to function. Without them, things go wrong at the cellular level, sometimes causing serious diseases.
Building a machine learning program to advance drug discovery
Predicting how proteins interact with each other and with metals earned Kalafatis the Goldwater Scholar distinction. While tools like Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold, recognized with a Nobel Prize, can predict how a protein folds into its three-dimensional shape, they cannot accurately predict new protein-protein or protein-metal interactions.
In the Gohil lab, Kalafatis teamed up with a senior graduate student, Abhinav Swaminathan, and started developing his own computational program to fill that gap — an AI-based prediction tool that maps which proteins in the human body bind to metals and how.
By using the Texas A&M High Performance Research Computing Facility to run that tool across thousands of proteins at once, he hopes to uncover previously unknown interactions that could point scientists toward new drug targets. Kalafatis was inspired by the Gohil lab’s discovery of elesclomol, a copper-transporting drug that is now being used to treat Menkes disease a copper deficiency disorder that causes neurological damage in children.
It is this kind of impactful research that Kalafatis said keeps pulling him back to the lab, where he has benefited from a highly collaborative and supportive environment with diverse expertise.
“I put a lot of effort into this research,” he said. “I found it challenging and really fun, and by the end I had something I thought could improve the foundational science around proteins and ultimately be applied in ways that improve people’s lives.”
That something ultimately became a Goldwater Scholar application, a nomination Kalafatis did not know about until Gohil recommended him for this prestigious award.
Kalafatis’ course work in physical chemistry and biochemistry has deepened his appreciation for the field, and his rigorous research experience has given him something tangible to validate his efforts. Armed with this background, he plans to apply to dual medical/research doctoral programs this fall, with the long-term goal of using protein folding research to develop new drugs and make science-based medicine more accessible worldwide.
