Prof. Francesca Fanelli works at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (UNIMORE), the Department of Life Sciences in Modena, Italy. She owns a Master degree in Medicinal Chemistry, University of Bari, Italy (1989) and a PhD in Medicinal Chemistry in the area of Computational Medicinal and Biophysical Chemistry from the University of Bari (1994). From 1994 to 2001 she was a postdoctoral fellow at UNIMORE with frequent visits at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) in the context of scientific collaboration. In the years 2000 to 2005 Prof. Fanelli worked as an external consultant of Serono Pharmaceutical Research Institute (Geneva, Switzerland). From 2002 to 2006 she was an Assistant Scientist of the Dulbecco Telethon Institute (DTI), hosted by the Department of Chemistry, UNIMORE. DTI is a program of personal awards conceived to avoid “Brain Drain” or allow “Brain Gain”. In the years 2007-2011, she was an Associate Scientist of DTI, hosted by the Department of Chemistry, UNIMORE. Later from 2007 to 2019 she was an Associate Professor of Biochemistry, the Department of Life Sciences, UNIMORE, and from 2019 to present she is a Professor of Biochemistry, the Department of Life Sciences, UNIMORE. Since 2002 she is the Leader of the Computational Structural Biology group (https://www.csbl.unimore.it/) at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.
Her main research topics include:
- Computational modeling and simulations of RasGTPases and their GEFs, with focus on GPCRs and heterotrimeric G proteins;
- structural determinants of rod opsin mutations linked to autosomal dominant Retinitis Pigmentosa;
- development and applications of software for the structural analysis of molecular simulations;
- development and application of tools and protocols for predicting supra-macromolecular assemblies;
- structure-based drug discovery/design.
The full list of publications can be found at:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=tkFT9g4AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate.
