Lillian Chong and graduate student, Anthony Bogetti, were part of a multi-institution team effort that won the Association for Computing Machinery’s Gordon Bell Special Prize for High Performance Computing-Based COVID-19 Research, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize of Supercomputing. A crowning achievement of this effort is the generation of atomically detailed views of how the spike protein of the coronavirus opens up before latching onto cells during infection. These views—which would have taken years to capture using standard computer simulations—required only 23 days using the Chong lab’s WESTPA software for weighted ensemble simulations. The winning project, “AI-Driven Multiscale Simulations Illuminate Mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 Spike Dynamics,” was presented virtually in November during the SC20 supercomputing conference; a preprint of the Gordon Bell paper can be found here.