Chiara Pallara

Background

About Chiara Pallara

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in the computational chemistry group at Iproteos for a Torres Quevedo Project. I am specialized in the application and development of computational tools to the design of peptidomimetics (i.e, structure-based and ligand-based drug design, homology modeling, molecular dynamics, in silico virtual screening, hit-to-lead and lead optimization) for human diseases. In February 2016 finished my phD project in the Protein Interaction and Docking (PID) group led by Dr. Juan Fernández-Recio at the BSC Life Science Department. The main focus of my PhD were theoretical chemistry and structural biology, especially in the fields of protein-protein interactions and protein molecular plasticity. My main research line consisted in the development and optimization of computational protocols to integrate conformational flexibility into docking simulations for the characterization of protein-protein interactions. During 2014 I performed a short-stay in the Biomolecular Modeling group led by Prof. Francesco Luigi Gervasio in the Department of Chemistry of UCL, where I broadened my experience in molecular dynamics protocols to sample rare events in bio-molecular systems. During my PhD, I contributed to several multidisciplinary research projects involving the application of molecular dynamics methods on different protein systems to understand the mechanistic effects of specific mutations, ligand binding or protein association. In addition, I regularly participated in CAPRI (Critical Assessment of PRediction of Interactions), a worldwide community experiment for the evaluation of protein-protein docking methods, together with the other PID group members.