I am excited to co-organize the Keystone Symposia meeting “Integrative Structural Biology: Bridging Fields, Techniques and Scales” together with Alex de Marco and Niccoló Banterle. We will bring together leading experts and emerging scientists across structural biology, biophysics, cryo-EM, NMR, molecular simulations and artificial intelligence to discuss the latest advances shaping our field.
2026 June: Amun Patel successfully defends his PhD thesis “Methods to Madness” on the development of simulation methods boosted by AI to dissect biomolecules… stay tuned to read his publications!
2024 October: Biophysical Society Thematic Meeting: Emerging Theoretical Approaches to Complement Single-Particle Cryo-Electron Microscopy
With the support of the Biophysical Society and the European Center for Molecular Simulations (CECAM), we are organizing an exciting meeting to maximize the potential of computations and experiments in the field of single-particle cryo-EM. The meeting will in October 2024 in beautiful Trieste (Italy). APPLY!
2024 September: Aakash Saha successfully defends his PhD thesis on CRISPR-Cas12 function and dynamics! Aakash will join Columbia University as a post-doc in the lab of Prof. Barry Honig. Congratulations Aakash!
2024 May: Giulia named Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar
Giulia has been selected as a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar for 2024. This prestigious award is given to early career faculty who showcased notable accomplishments in scholarly pursuits and a profound dedication to education. This acknowledgment celebrates the dedicated, imaginative, and motivating group of students and post-docs with whom Giulia has the privilege of collaborating every day.
2024 May: NSF Early Career Investigators Workshop in Chemistry
With Prof. Sarah Tasker, we are organizing an NSF funded workshop that will bring together junior faculty with established investigators and NSF program officers to discuss strategies for crafting research proposals, planning educational activities, and evaluating project goals. If you are a young PI starting your lab, apply at https://www.nsfcareerworkshop.com/.
2024 February: New awards for the lab members from the Biophysical Society
We are excited to join the 2024 Biophysical Society Meeting! Aakash Saha and Pablo R. Arantes receive the graduate student and post-doctoral travel award. Giulia receives the Theory and Computation Subgroup Early Career Award.
2023 July: Best Poster award at the Protein Society Meeting
Aakash Saha, graduate student in the lab, receives the Best Poster award at the Protein Society meeting.
2023 June: Best Poster award at the University of California Systemwide Bioengineering Symposium. BIC 2023 – UC Berkeley
Giulia receives a 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry. A huge thanks goes to the amazing members of our lab and to all mentors and the comunity that believe in our work!
2023 February: Lab members awards from the Biophysical Society!
The lab joins the 2023 Biophysical Society Meeting with seven contributions from students and post-docs. Mohd Ahsan, post-doc in the lab, receives the post-doctoral travel award.
2022 May: Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Advisor/Mentoring Award
Giulia receives the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Advisor/Mentoring Award from UCR. Our lab is striving to create new educational programs to mentor and encourage young students, including underrepresented minorities and women. We are very honored and humbled to receive this recognition, which further inspires our lab to excel in education.
2022 March: ACS OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty Award
Giulia receives the ACS OpenEye Outstanding Junior Faculty Award
2022 January: NSF CAREER award
We are grateful to the National Science Foundation for awarding us the NSF CAREER award! This will give us the opportunity to pursue exciting research and high-level education to mentor undergraduate and K12 students, including underrepresented minorities and women.
2021 September: JACS features our paper in the 2021 Early Career Investigators Virtual Issue
JACS featured our paper in the2021 Early Career Investigators Virtual Issue! This is the second time that JACS recognizes our work in this prestigious special issue. Our paper in JACS on the PAM-mediated allostery in Cas9 was selected for the 2018 Early Career Edition! Congratulations to all authors!
“This work demonstrates the tremendous value of combined NMR and state-of-the-art molecular dynamics in characterizing allostery”
2021 September: Giulia receives the Corwin Hansch Award for Outstanding Scientists under 40
This award is given by the Hansch-Fujita Foundation to an outstanding scientist under the age of 40 for significant contributions to the field of computational drug design. The award is named in honor of Corwin Hansch, a pioneer in computational drug discovery and late honorary chair of the QSAR & Chemoinformatics Society.
2021 June: We Love Molecular Dynamics is out!
Our new website dedicated to our outreaching and educational activities is out! WeLoveMolecularDynamics was inspired by the passion that high school students and undergraduates expressed for computational biophysics. Visit the website to know more about our programs and to join us from high schools! We aim at mentoring young students, including underrepresented minorities and women, to engage in higher education.
2021 May: Pablo Arantes will give a talk at the CRISPR meeting
Congratulations to Pablo Arantes, who will present his work using molecular dynamics to understand the off-target interactions in CRISPR-Cas9 at the virtual CRISPR meeting!
2021 May: PSC highlights our research using Anton-2!
2021 February: Aakash Saha receives the Student Research Achievement Award from the BPS
Congratulations to Aakash Saha for receiving the Biophysical Society 2021 Student Research Achievement Award in the Bioengineering subgroup!
2021 January: Aakash Saha receives the outstanding Teaching Assistant award at UCR
Congratulations to Aakash for being such a fantastic scientist and teacher!
2020 December: Our first NERSC grant!
We are grateful to NERSC, which awards us computer time at the facilities of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab to initiate a new project on genome editing technologies (grant m3807).
2020 November: Amun Patel joins our lab as a graduate student!
2020 October: Exciting Nobel Prize in Chemistry!
Our lab is excited for the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Jennifer A. Doudna & Emmanuelle Charpentier for the development of new genome editing technologies.
The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment XSEDE awards us again! We are very grateful for the opportunity to continue running classical and ab-initio simulations on the XSEDE facilities (grant TG-MCB160059).
2020 May: The COVID19 HPC consortium grants us computer time on Anton-2!
We are thankful to the COVID-19 HPC consortium for awarding us computer time on Anton-2 to pursue research on the detection of SARS-CoV-2 using emerging CRISPR technologies!
2020 April: Special Issue on Multiscale Modeling from Macromolecules to Cell
Our Special Issue in Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences is finally out! We collected several papers at the frontier of molecular simulation techniques. This special issue ranks the second in the section “Computer modeling and simulation” (after a topic on Covid19) and is in the top 10% of the entire journal “Frontiers in molecular biosciences” with more than 70,000 views!
We are grateful to the National Science Foundation and to the Chemistry division for awarding us a research grant that will support our research and our educational program!
2019 August: Women Make COMP at the ACS meeting!
We are excited for the first Women Make COMP symposium at the ACS Meeting! Established women in computational chemistry are meeting young scientists to inspire the next generation of women in computational chemistry!
The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment XSEDE awards computer time to our lab to perform our research (grant TG-MCB160059).
2019 March: Biophysical Society meeting in Baltimore
Excited to be@BiophysicalSocfor#BPS2019! Our lab gave a talk on the off-target effects in#CRISPR and a poster on its#allostericregulation with great feedback! We are also honoured for being at the#Art&Science contest with our COVER ART!
2019 February:CECAM workshop on multiscale modeling!
Giulia co-organises the CECAM workshop at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne on the next frontiers in musicale modeling. To highlight the state-of-the-art, to tackle the current challenges and to inspire future innovations! The outcomes of this workshop are featured in a Special Issue on Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences.
2018 Fall: Our lab is growing!
Brandon Mitchell and Nasim Farajpour join the lab as a graduate students, with Dominic Biondo who is currently rotating. Two undergraduate students have also joined the lab: Marco Medrano and Ponmathi Jayaseelan.
2018 August: COMP meets CRYO @ACS meeting.
Giulia co-organises the symposium “COMP meets CRYO: new frontiers in flexible fitting, image processing and refinement of cryo-EM data” at the 256th ACS meeting in Boston.
The Palermo lab is up & running at the University of California Riverside. Our lab gets equipped with four Linux workstations, which include two GPUs (an Nvidia GTX-class for GPU computing and an Nvidia Quadro for interactive visualization) and 12 Intel Xeon cores. High Performance Computing is provided us thanks to the UCR HPCC and XSEDE (grant TG-MCB160059).
It is a honour and a pleasure having been selected for the Early Career Board of the #JCIM_ACS. I am proud to be part of a team of brilliant young scientists for pushing the frontiers of computer simulations!
2018 February:The Biophysical Society features our research!
I am honored to be part to the prestigious symposium “Future of Biophysics” of the Biophysical Society, presenting our research on the mechanistic understanding of genome editing technologies. This has been an amazing experience with top scientists across the globe.
2017 November: Best use of HPC in Life Sciences!
I am happy to receive the 2017 HPC wire prize for Best use of High Performance Computing (HPC) in Life Science! This prize recognise the effort we have done over the years to bridge high-level theoretical chemistry with real-world biological sciences.
2017 August: Allosteric effects in CRISPR-Cas9!
By using molecular dynamics and network models derived from graph theory, we published in JACS the discovery of an allosteric mechanism in CRISPR-Cas9 that enables for DNA processing upon recognition! We are on the cover with the beautiful artwork of Dr. Clarisse G. Ricci!
2017 June:An other piece in the puzzle of CRISPR-Cas9
2017 March:Anticancer drug gets a boost with antirheumatic
Molecular dynamics and X-ray crystallography have discovered that combining an anticancer drug with an antirheumatic produces improved effects against tumors. Our paper in Nature Communications paves the way for novel strategies in anticancer drug discovery. Read our story on Science Daily and in French on 20min!
2017 February: First place prize at the Art & Science image contest!
We thank all members of the Biophysical Society for having awarded us the first place prize at the 2017 Biophysical Society national meeting in New Orleans! I am equally sharing this prize with my friends and colleagues Amelia Palermo (ETH-Zürich, handmade painting) and Lorenzo Casalino (SISSA-Trieste, digital manipulation).
2016 September: Supercomputers reveal acrobatics of CRISPR-Cas9
AMBER is a simulation code and – more broadly – a school for rigorous molecular simulations. I feel excited for being on the cover of the AMBER 2016 reference manual with my painting of the “Steitz & Steitz” mechanism. This painting describes the role of metal ions in the enzymatic processing of DNA & RNA, which is a paradigm in biology, discovered in 1993 by Seitz & Seitz! We have published mechanistic investigations via theoretical methods in Acc Chem Res and in JCTC.
2016 June: The RNA that snips and stitches RNA
By using quantum/classical molecular simulations and the Car-Parrinello approach, our paper in JACS describes the mechanism of RNA cleavage, in self-splicing ribozymes! This paper poses the basis for understanding splicing in humans. Read our press release onScience Newsline Biology and Science Daily.
2015 December: Metal Drugs to Fight Cancer
Metal drugs are a challenge for molecular simulations. By using quantum-classical simulations, we revealed how novel metal drugs compounds interfere with chromatin compaction and post-translational modifications, being promising against cancer. Read our story on Science Daily.
Palermo Lab 