Raffaello Potestio

Curriculum Vitae

I graduated in Physics from the University of Rome La Sapienza in 2006, with a Master Thesis on Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics under the supervision of G. Martinelli. In the same year I enrolled in a PhD course in Statistical Physics at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA-ISAS) in Trieste. In 2010 I defended my PhD Thesis on Coarse-grained models of protein structure and interactions, supervised by C. Micheletti. In November 2010 I joined K. Kremer's group at MPIP as a postdoc. Between August 2013 and December 2017 I have been Project Leader of the Statistical Mechanics of BioMolecules group. Between January 2018 and December 2020 I have been tenure track assistant professor (RTD-B) at the University of Trento, Italy, where I now serve as associate professor and PI of the VARIAMOLS ERC StG project. My group and I are part of the Statistical and Biological Physics group of the Physics Dept. of the University of Trento.

My complete CV can be downloaded here.

Research interests

My main research interest since during the PhD has been the development and application of coarse-grained models and coarse-graining strategies for soft matter, in particular biologically relevant systems. The two-sided, complementary goals of this approach are to understand the most fundamental and/or universal features of a system and, at the same time, to improve the computational efficiency of a simulation.

Secondly, I work on the study of topologically self-entangled biopolymers, namely knotted proteins and DNA. To this end, I make use of standard and ad hoc coarse-grained models developed specifically for the systems under examination.

Teaching

• In the first semester of Academic Year 2019/20 and subsequent I have taught the course Statistical Mechanics for the Master course (here the link).

• In the second semester of Academic Year 2018/19 and subsequent I have taught the course Multi-scale methods in soft matter.

• In the first semester of Academic Years 2018/19 and 2020/21 I have taught a short course on selected topics in Applications of Statistical Mechanics in Biology in the framework of PAF - Percorso di Approfondimento in Fisica.