Francesco Colizzi

Francesco Colizzi is a Tenured Scientist (Científico Titular) of the CSIC and Principal Investigator of the Molecular Ocean Lab at the Institute of Advanced Chemistry of Catalonia (IQAC-CSIC, Barcelona). The lab uses molecular dynamics as a "computational microscope" to study biological processes, with four main lines: plastic depolymerization (substrate-enzyme binding, adsorption, thermostability and allostery toward the design of improved enzymes), drug discovery against challenging targets such as RNA and protein-protein interactions, molecular biophysics, and marine molecular ecology (tracing molecular evolution in the ocean by combining structure-based protein computations and metagenomics).

He studied Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Technologies at the University of Bologna, with a molecular modelling internship at ETH Zürich (2003-2004), and obtained a PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences (computer-aided drug design) at the same university (2006-2009), including a stay at the University of California San Francisco. He was a research fellow at the University of Bologna, a postdoctoral fellow at SISSA (Trieste, 2010-2013), with research stays at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Université de Sherbrooke, and a Marie Curie fellow in the Molecular Modeling and Bioinformatics group at IRB Barcelona (2016-2021).

In 2021 he started the Molecular Ocean Lab as a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC), and since 2023 he leads it at IQAC-CSIC.

Keywords: molecular dynamics, enhanced sampling, free-energy calculations, ligand and molecular design, drug discovery, RNA and DNA simulations, plastic depolymerization and upcycling, marine ecology, molecular evolution.