Davide Branduardi website

Here is a summary (from the most recent) of my professional life.

I have been  Principal Applications scientist for Schrodinger Inc (2015-2020). There I've learnt a lot about free energy perturbation, how to run them, interpret and analyze them. I also had the opportunity of working with LiveDesign and Desmond MD code. Schrodinger team is fantastic and people are top notch. I've learnt a great deal from them but I wanted to do more coding.

Between 2013 and 2015 I worked at Janssen Prevention Center (formerly Crucell Vaccine Institute) in Leiden, the Netherlands where I worked with in-silico techniques on protein engineering projects and small-molecules projects. There I learnt a lot on the world of biologics from the great colleagues I had. Getting out of my academic cocoon was a formidable challenge but truly exciting, and a real eye-opener for me. Additionally, there I discovered how deeply I love dutch borrel.

Before that I was postdoc at Max Planck for Biophysics in Frankfurt am Main, in Theoretical Molecular Biophysics group led by Josè Faraldo-Gomez. My main research focus is on free energy estimates of chemical reactions and allosteric transitions via molecular simulations.

In particular develop and employ path based methods (Path Collective Variables approaches and String Methods) for optimizing reaction paths. To this aim, I actively collaborate in developing PLUMED which is a set of open source (L-GPL) routines  that can add enhanced sampling capabilities to existing molecular dynamics codes.

Before coming to Frankfurt I got my Master in Material Science in Milan, I spent one year at Mario Negri institute for pharmacological research and later did my PhD in Michele Parrinello's research group at ETHZ. After that I joined the D3 department at IIT in Genoa for a postdoc in the computational unit.