People

Walter Rocchia graduated cum laude in Electronic Engineering in 1996, with a thesis on Quantum Computing. In 2000, he got a PhD in Electronic Devices at the University of Trento. He then was a Research Scholar at the Biochemistry Department of the Columbia University, developing models to calculate the electrostatic field generated by biological macromolecules in solution. As a consultant in the Corporate Technology Centre at Honeywell Int (NJ, USA), he worked on Carbon Nanotube physical properties. That activity was pursued at the Bioengineering Research Centre “E. Piaggio” of University of Pisa where he studied the modeling of the physical properties of actuating polymers in a wet environment. In 2003 he joined the Molecular Biophysics group of National Enterprise for nanoScience and Nanotechnology (NEST-INFM-CNR), at Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, working on molecular recognition and targeting. There, he extended his interests from algorithms for speeding up and making more accurate the calculation of the electrostatic interaction energy of biomolecules to Bioinformatic and Biostatistical techniques aimed at identifying targets and engineering molecules involved in biochemical pathways of medical relevance. In 2008, he moved to the IIT Drug Discovery and Development Unit. He is author of more than 30 publications on International Journals, book contributions and Proceedings.

Sergio Decherchi obtained the "Laurea" degree summa cum laude in Electronics Engineering in 2007 from Genoa University, Italy. Since 2005 he started collaborating with the Department of Biophysical and Electronics Engineering (DIBE) of Genoa University, where he completed a PhD in Data Mining in 2010. Currently he holds a post-doc position at IIT/D3 Computational Chemistry group. His main research interests are: computational byophisics and computational intelligence. S. Decherchi published more than 20 papers in refereed conferences and journals. He is Member of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, reviewer for several IEEE and Elsevier journals and for the conferences IJCNN, ISCAS and NOLTA from IEEE.

José B. Colmenares received his degree in Geophysics Engineering from the Simon Bolivar University (Caracas, Venezuela) in September 2003. There he worked with the induced polarization method, and GPR for environmental purposes. He got a MsC in Applied Mathematics from the University of the Andes (Merida, Venezuela) in 2008, where he worked on electromagnetic wave modelling and for his thesis solved the MASW inversion using least-squares Support Vector Machines. He is currently enrolled in the PhD program of the University of Padova at the School of Earth Sciences. He also has experience in seismic wave simulations (has done some experiments concerning RTM among other things). Besides doing his PhD at Padova, he is a Fellow in Computational Chemistry at the Italian Institute of Technology, where he works on the solution of the Poisson Boltzmann equation at the Drug Discovery and Development unit.