PhD Student · Chemical Engineering · Northeastern

Joshua Kojo Aduampong Mantey

I use atomistic molecular dynamics and machine learning to work out why the gut’s mucus layer stops so many oral drugs — and what would get them through.

Where
SimBioSys Laboratory, Northeastern University. Advised by Srirupa Chakraborty.
Latest
Oral presentation, “Enhanced Sampling to Study MUC2 Interactions with Bile Salts”, at the AIChE Annual Meeting, Boston, November 2025. All publications and talks
Looking for
An industry co-op in pharma or biotech, on a computational chemistry, formulation or molecular ML team.
Download resume (PDF)mantey.j@northeastern.eduGitHub
Joshua Mantey at Northeastern University

What I work on

The mucus barrier
Most of an oral dose never reaches the bloodstream. I simulate full-length MUC2 mucin — 5,200+ amino acids, over 3 million atoms — together with the bile salts around it, to find where drug molecules get held up.
Machine learning on simulation data
A 1.2 µs trajectory is about 10 TB, far past what anyone reads by hand. I build the Python pipelines that turn it into something interpretable: DCCM, PCA, t-SNE, spectral embedding.
Where it is meant to end up
The aim is formulations that get past the mucus layer rather than around it, starting with the thickened mucus in cystic fibrosis. That is the goal, not yet a result.

Project details, methods and current status

How I got here

I studied petrochemical engineering at KNUST in Ghana, where my research was on amino acids as corrosion inhibitors. That is not as far from this as it sounds. You are still asking what one molecule does when it meets a surface — the surface just happens to be the lining of someone’s intestine now.

Outside the lab I am Academic and Networking Chair and Mentorship Chair for the African Graduate Student Association at Northeastern, which mostly means running career panels and answering the questions nobody wants to ask in a room full of people. I cook a lot and play chess badly.

Writing and press