Rate My Professor Zackary Falls

Zackary M. Falls, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, University at Buffalo, where he has held faculty positions since 2020. He previously served as Research Assistant Professor from 2020 to 2022 and Postdoctoral Fellow from 2017 to 2020 in the same department following his PhD in Computational Chemistry from University at Buffalo in 2017 and BS in Chemistry from Canisius College in 2012. Falls also completed an NLM T15 Postdoctoral Fellowship at Jacobs School in 2020. His additional appointments include Adjunct Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center since 2025, Affiliated Faculty Member in the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at University at Buffalo since 2025, Affiliated Faculty Member in the Clinical and Research Institute on Addictions since 2024, and Affiliated Faculty Member in the Department of Structural Biology since 2024.

Falls' research specializes in drug discovery and pharmacoinformatics, focusing on the development of algorithms for the Computational Analysis of Novel Drug Opportunities (CANDO) platform, data analytics applied to electronic health records to identify health risks and disparities, and the design of therapeutics for diseases including non-small cell lung cancer, COVID-19, and opioid misuse. He integrates structural bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, and clinical informatics in collaborations addressing biological and clinical challenges with academia and industry. Key research interests encompass addictions, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, biomedical informatics, clinical informatics, computational biology, computational chemistry, computational drug discovery, drug abuse, drug design, genomics and proteomics, infectious disease, proteomics, structural biology, team science, transcriptomics, and translational research. Falls has earned the Sinsheimer Scholar Award in 2024 and the T15 Informatics Training Fellowship Award in 2017, among others from his graduate and undergraduate career. Representative publications include 'Strategies for robust, accurate, and generalizable benchmarking of drug discovery platforms' (Bioinformatics, 2025, with M. Van Norden et al.), 'Deciphering bisphenol A (BPA)-elicited osteoarthritis mechanisms through network toxicology and molecular docking, then de novo generation of novel therapeutic candidates' (BMC Pharmacology & Toxicology, 2025, with S. Xu et al.), 'The implications of APOBEC3-mediated C-to-U RNA editing for human disease' (Communications Biology, 2024, with M. Van Norden et al.), and 'Differences in prescribing patterns of opioid dependence drugs among patients with primary alcohol use problems and opioid use disorders within New York State by social determinant factors, 2005-2018' (Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, 2024, with C.H. Lu et al.). He has presented lectures such as 'Shifting the Drug Discovery Paradigm: Multitarget, Multiscale, and Multisource' at University at Buffalo's Clinical and Translational Therapeutics Seminar Series and Buffalo Protein Science Group in 2025, and at Nazareth University in 2023. Falls contributes to service as Faculty Council Representative since 2024, member of various faculty search committees, the Research Data Working Group since 2025, and Scientific Program Committee Member for AMIA 2026 Amplify. He serves as Review Editor for Frontiers in Chemistry since 2022.