Confirmed Speakers

Gerald (‘Gerry’) Maggiora, PhD, received a Bachelor of Science in chemistry and a PhD in biophysics from the University of California, Davis. He has more than 20 years experience in academia as a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Kansas, as well as five years as a professor in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Arizona. He has a comparable amount of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, where he served as the Director of Computer-Aided Drug Discovery for three different companies. His early work spanned numerous fields related to the development of quantum mechanical and molecular mechanics methods and their application to problems of mechanistic organic chemistry, vision, photosynthetic energy conversion, and the structural chemistry of drugs, biomolecules, and proteins. After joining the pharma industry, he directed his efforts towards the development and application of similarity and diversity methods and the analysis of biologically relevant chemical space to drug research.

Maggiora’s early university research interests were focused on computational studies of molecular systems in biology and chemistry including quantum chemistry, organic reaction mechanisms, photosynthesis, vision, potential energy functions, structural chemistry, structure-activity relationships and drug design. While in the pharmaceutical industry his research focused on computational aspects of drug design and chemical informatics with special emphasis on applications of chemical space, activity landscapes, and activity cliffs and their application to drug research. Currently, he is continuing his work on chemical spaces and on soft computing (e.g. fuzzy and rough set methods) approaches to SAR analysis applied to the identification and design of new bioactive molecules and drugs.

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Giulia Palermo is a computational biophysicist with expertise in molecular simulations. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California Riverside, and a cooperating Faculty in the Department of Chemistry. Her research uses computational biophysics to clarify the mechanism of action of biological systems of key importance for genome editing and regulation.

She is a native of Italy where she earned her PhD in 2013 from the Italian Institute of Technology, working in the group of Dr. Marco De Vivo. She has been a post-doc in the group of Prof. Ursula Rothlisberger at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), where she worked on ab-initio methods. In 2016, she has been awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation (NSF) post-doctoral fellowship to join the group of Prof. J. Andrew McCammon at the University of California San Diego, where she earned experience in novel multiscale methods enabling the study of increasingly realistic biological systems.

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