Rita Casadio

Rita Casadio after her degree in Physics at the University of Bologna, Italy, attended several courses both in Italy and abroad and acquired experience and theoretical background in different fields, such as Computer Science, Membrane and Protein Biophysics, Bioenergetics, and Irreversible Thermodynamics. After working in Laboratories of Biophysics both in the United States and in Germany, in 1987 RC became an Assistant Professor of Biophysics at the University of Bologna Italy. Since 1/10/2003 she is a full professor of Biochemistry/Bioinformatics/Biophysics at UNIBO. RC worked in membrane and protein Biophysics (particularly with bacteriorhodopsin from Halobacterium Halobium and F1F0 ATPases from mesophilic organisms), both experimentally and theoretically.

Presently she is interested in computer modeling of relevant biological processes, such as protein folding and modeling, protein-protein interaction, genome annotation, protein interaction networks, and SNPs search and annotation and their effect on protein stability. One major field of research is the development of specific software for problem-solving large-scale analysis of biomedical and biotechnological data out of genome sequencing or experiments on proteomes and interactomes. Methods are based on neural networks, hidden Markov models, Support Vector Machines, conditional random fields, and their combinations.

Rita Casadio's research is devoted to different aspects of protein structure prediction, including prediction of secondary and tertiary structure, membrane protein topology, protein function, protein-protein, and protein-DNA interaction, protein reaction mechanisms in biological processes, and de novo design of peptides/molecules(for details see http://lipid.biocomp.unibo.it). RC is the author of about 300 scientific papers and presented her work at several (over 300) national and international meetings.