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, Italy. 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 Max Planck Institute for Polymer research in Mainz, Germany 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. I am PI of the VARIAMOLS ERC StG project and the HAMMOCK FARE project.

My complete CV can be downloaded here.

Publication list

A full publication list can be found at this link.

Invited talks

A full list can be found at this link.

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.

Theses and internships

Master theses and internships (tirocini) are available in the broad area of biophysics, soft matter physics, molecular modelling, molecular dynamics simulations, complex systems.

Students interested in a master thesis are encouraged to arrange an informal appointment to discuss it.

Alumni

Former PhD students

• Marta Rigoli, later at U. Trento (IT)
• Marco Giulini, later at U. Utrecht (NL)
• Karsten Kreis, later at NVIDIA (CA)
• Saeed Najafi, later at UCSB (USA)
• Maziar Heidari, later at MPI-BP (GER)
• Raffaele Fiorentini, later at at U. Trento (IT)

Former postdoctoral fellows

• Thomas Tarenzi
• Raffaele Fiorentini, later in the Italian Air Force
• Claudio Perego, later at SUPSI (CH)
• Robinson Cortes-Huerto, later at MPI-P (GER)