Ron Hills, Ph.D.
Location
Ron Hills is a tenured faculty in the Westbrook College of Health Professions. Since his initial appointment in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences & Administration, he has taught courses in biochemistry, medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, evidence-based medicine, biostatistics, and/or data science. Dr. Hills' scientific training was in biochemistry and multiscale computational modeling. After spending a decade in the School of Pharmacy, his scholarly interests evolved to include the role of lipids and nutraceuticals in chronic health and disease. In his teaching Dr. Hills strives to illustrate the power of integrative medicine for optimizing health outcomes. Students working with Dr. Hills' learn how to develop predictive computational models and perform meta-analyses of the current research literature. Prior to joining UNE, Dr. Hills was a National Institutes of Health Kirschstein Research Fellow at the University of Utah.
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Credentials
Education
Expertise
- Biochemistry
- Cardiovascular disease
- Medicinal chemistry
- Nutrition
- Pharmacology
- Protein structure and function
- Scientific computing
- Team-based learning
Post-Doctoral Training
University of Utah, 2008-2010
Research
Selected publications
White, A.M.B., H.R. Mishcon, J.L. Redwanski and R.D. Hills Jr. 2020. Statin treatment in specific patient groups: Role for improved cardiovascular risk markers. Journal of Clinical Medicine 9:3748. Article
Hills Jr., R.D., B.A. Pontefract, H.R. Mishcon, C.A. Black, S.C. Sutton and C.R. Theberge. 2019. Gut microbiome: Profound implications for diet and disease. Nutrients 11:1613. 2021 Best Paper Award, Article
Hills Jr., R.D. 2018. Refining amino acid hydrophobicity for dynamics simulation of membrane proteins. PeerJ 6:e4230. Article
Fosso-Tande, J., C. Black, S.G. Aller, L. Lu and R.D. Hills Jr. 2017. Simulation of lipid-protein interactions with the CgProt force field. AIMS Molecular Science 4:352-69. Article
Hills Jr., R.D. and N. McGlinchey. 2016. Model parameters for simulation of physiological lipids. Journal of Computational Chemistry 37:1112-18. Article
Research interests
Lipids and nutraceuticals
Lipid-protein interactions
Multiscale modeling