Raffaello Potestio

Coordinator

Doctoral programme – Physics


Associate professor

Department of Physics

Associate professor: Doctoral programme – Physics

Via Sommarive, 14 - 38123 Povo
tel. 0461 282912
raffaello.potestio[at]unitn [dot] it
Education
  • 2010 PhD in Physics and Chemistry of Biological Systems from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy
  • 2006 M.Sc. in Physics from the University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy
  • 2004 B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy
Academic career and teaching activities
  • 2021-present Associate professor at the University of Trento, Physics Dept.
  • 2018-2020 Tenure track assistant professor (RTDB) at the University of Trento, Physics Dept.
  • 2013-2017 Group Leader at Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research
  • 2010-2013 PostDoc position and fellowship at Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research
  • 2006-2010 PhD position and fellowship at SISSA
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.

I also 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.

Awards and honours
  • December 2022 PI of the project SENTINEL - Selezione naturale nei tumori pre-metastatici investigata tramite reti neurali (Natural selection in pre-metastatic tumours investigated through neural networks) funded by Fondazione Cassa Rurale di Trento
  • January 2022 Habilitation for full professorship by the Italian Ministry for University and Research
  • May 2021 Partner of the project CheEntropia! funded by CARITRO - Cassa di Risparmio di Trento e Rovereto
  • October 2020 Co-PI of the project AIACE - Artificial Intelligence Tracking Algorithms of Covid-19 Epidemics funded by the University of Trento
  • June 2020 PI of the project HAMMOCK - Hybrid atomistic / coarse-grained molecular modelling with consistent kinetics funded by the call FARE (Italian Ministry of University and Research)
  • August 2019 Partner of the EUREGIO Mobility Fund for the project HPCDSI - High performance computing in computational data science funded by the Euroregion Trentino - South Tyrol - Tyrol
  • July 2019 Partner of the project SPGAS - Smart and Parallel Graph Analytics System funded by the Free University of Bozen
  • January 2018 PI of the project VARIAMOLS - variable resolution algorithms for macromolecular simulations funded by the ERC - H2020
  • February 2016 Project contributor of a project proposal for HPC Access to the JURECA supercomputer at the Forschungszentrum Jülich
  • May 2014 Co-PI of a Project (B4) of the Collaborative Research Center / Transregio TRR 14 (4 years time window, 165,400 euro assigned to the B4 project)
  • April-June 2012 Participant at the KITP program Physical Principles of Multiscale Modeling, Analysis and Simulation in Soft Condensed Matter, Santa Barbara (USA)
  • December 2011 Awarded the prize for the best PhD thesis in Physics at SISSA in the year 2010