Josh BERRYMAN

Current position

Josh Berryman is a research scientist (level 2) with supervision and project management authority (“ADR”). He is the team leader for Biomolecular Modelling in the Theoretical Chemical Physics group of the Department of Physics and Materials Science. He is a member of the college of fellows of the Luxembourg Institute for Advanced Studies and of the Complex Living Systems Initiative of the physics department and the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Bioinformatics.

Research

Dr Berryman develops and applies the latest computational methods to carry out interdisciplinary research around the topics of molecular biophysics and neuroscience, his work ranges from the fundamental to the applied, with relevance in particular to the topic of neurodegenerative disease.

PhD supervision: (In 2025) Dr Berryman has hired and graduated two PhD students from his own funding and has one currently active on this basis, as well as several co-supervisions. His external funding won to date as sole or lead investigator is €569,500.

Teaching

Dr Berryman has taught at the University of Luxembourg since 2011, as well as (on secondment) at the Universität des Saarlandes in Germany. He has led courses on classical electrodynamics, computational physics, and data science / machine learning, typically one course each semester.

Dr Berryman sits on the jury académique for the BSc in Physics, coordinating with colleagues the sanctions or accommodations of individual students.

Dr Berryman assisted in the foundation of the Physics and Materials Science MSc (now titled simply as the MSc in Physics), advertising the course nationally and internationally for its first years, purchasing, installing, and maintaining the computing resources necessary, and supervising the MSc computational labs.

Outreach

Dr Berryman is régisseur de caisse for the Association Luxembourgoise des Physiciens a.s.b.l. : a non-executive rôle in the national physical society.

Dr Berryman is a représentant sectoriel at the Nationale Eltervertretung (National Parents Union) where he advocates for improved standards in education, to be achieved by greater transparency and accountability, and by making a priority of the health, safety and well-being of the students.

Dr Berryman is a member of the AMBER international software collaboration, recognized as a co-author of AMBER 14 (released 2014) and also credited for 15, 20, 22, and 24.

Dr Berryman is part of Luxembourg’s collaboration with Google to develop excellence in machine learning and AI for science, contributing to the development and characterization of new AI systems for molecular modeling such as GEMS (see publication list below).

Dr Berryman coordinated the COVAMINF workgroup for the EU Joint Programme on Neurodegenerative Disease, leading the global investigation of the alarming possibility that the SARS-CoV2 would prove to be the initiating factor for a delayed second epidemic of neurodegenerative disease. (The answer is ‘yes, but not that much’, at present it seems that there are other more serious and more addressable causes of neurodegeneration).