Limongelli Vittorio

Biography

Professor Limongelli received his Master's Degree in Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Technology at the University of Naples Federico II (Italy) in 2004, qualification to job practice as Pharmacist in 2004 and received at the same university my PhD degree in Drug Science in 2007. During These years, his research was focused on standard computational methods (eg molecular docking, homology modeling) applied to the study of systems of biopharmaceutical interest. In 2007 he was visiting PhD at the University of Bologna (Italy) in the group of Prof. Andrea Cavalli and later at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) in the group of Prof. Michele Parrinello. Here he made my PostDoc working in the field of enhanced sampling simulations and study of rare events in biosystems with a special focus on ligand / biotarget recognition process. In December 2010, he received a permanent position as Researcher at the University of Naples "Federico II" (Italy) and in 2014, he obtained the qualification of Associate Professor for Italian Universities. His research has led to several publications on high impact journals (5 PNAS, 5 JACS, 2 Angew. Chemie, 2 NAR among the others) and has been acknowledged by a number of awards such as the most meritorious runner-up of the 2017 EFMC (European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry) Prize for Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia; award for the Young Researcher in Medicinal Chemistry 2016 from the French Medicinal Chemistry Society; the 2013 "Scrocco" Prize of the Italian Chemical Society for "the original contribution to the study of biological phenomena using advanced computational methods".

Research Interest

- Computational medical chemistry (eg Development of moelcular binding model - Drug design - Virtual Screening) -Development and application of a multiscale computational approach that combines Coarse-Grained and Metadynamics (CG-Meta) to describe long-time processes in very large biosystems (eg GPCRs, Transporters, Membrane Receptors) -Application of advanced computational techniques (metadynamics, umbrella sampling etc.) for computing the free energy surface of processes of biological interest -Use of advanced computational techniques for computing binding free energy and kinetics of systems of biological interest -Study of the folding / unfolding processes of biosystems (proteins and DNA) -Study of the conformational changes in biosystems (eg kinases, GltPh, adrenergic receptors) in their or states and during ligand binding