 Click in the image to enlarge it | 2022 Season’s greetings The VARIAMOLS and the HAMMOCK research teams wish all our friends a pleasant holiday season and a very happy new year 2023! |
 Picture by MoniQue photo – Monica Condini. Click on the image to enlarge it. | On September 30 the group PI Raffaello Potestio went on stage with actor Enrico Tavernini for an augmented lecture entitled Molecular Vodoo, in the framework of the Teatro della Meraviglia festival. The event was organised by the theatre company Arditodesìo |
 Click on the image to enlarge it | On June 24-25, 2022 the VARIAMOLS group had a field trip to Venice, to meet the Statistical Mechanics group of the Ca’ Foscari University and the European Centre for Living Technologies (ECLT) in Venice. Our meeting was aimed at sparking interactions and fostering the collaboration between the two groups. Two intense days of talks and chatters have indeed achieved this goal, and we look forward to tightening our scientific bonds! |
 | On January 14, 2022 the public exhibition A daily conversation with wonder has been inaugurated. The exhibition features 36 images that walk the observer though the scientific research of the VARIAMOLS group as well as through the group itself – the people, the objects, the buildings, the spaces. Reads more on the exhibition announcement page and the VARIAMOLS VISUAL project page. |
 | The paper “Communication pathways bridge local and global conformations in an IgG4 antibody” was published on Scientific Reports; here is a University of Trento press release about it (in Italian). |
 | EMBO workshop “Advances and Challenges in Biomolecular Simulations”: our team member Raffaele Fiorentini receives a honourable mention for his poster. Read more at this link. |
 | European Researchers’ Night – Sharper Night 2021 September 24, 2021 Our group will join the ERN events with a presentation titled “La scienza illustrata”, as part of the VARIAMOLS VISUAL project. |
 | SBP seminar by Dr. Jan Smrek, University of Vienna, Austria Talk title: “Topological Tuning of DNA Mobility in Entangled Solutions of Supercoiled Plasmids” The talk will take place online. |
 | SBP seminar by Dr. Jan Smrek, University of Vienna, Austria Talk title: “Topological Tuning of DNA Mobility in Entangled Solutions of Supercoiled Plasmids” The talk will take place online. |
 | The 2020 activity report of the Statistical and Biological Physics group of the University of Trento has been made available. You can download it here. |
 | 18 December 2020 An article about the VARIAMOLS project was published on the Italian daily newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore Here is the link to the online article. |
 | July 2020 An article about the VARIAMOLS project was published on the EU Research magazine Here is the link to the online article. |
 | June 2020 Ministry of University and Research awarded grant to VARIAMOLS PI The Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research has approved and funded the project HAMMOCK – Hybrid atomistic / coarse-grained molecular modelling with consistent kinetics. This grant was assigned by the call FARE Ricerca in Italia: Framework per l’attrazione ed il rafforzamento delle eccellenze per la Ricerca in Italia to the PI of the VARIAMOLS project Raffaello Potestio to carry out a research line parallel to that of the ERC Starting Grant. The focus of the HAMMOCK project lies in the development and application of variable-resolution modelling techniques to investigate the structure-dynamics-function relation in proteins, particularly in the context of coarse-grained modelling. The project has a duration of four years, starting on June 1st, 2020; the awarded fund consists of 214k€ that will allow the group to hire a PhD student and a postdoctoral fellow in the next months. |
 | June 2020 Interview about the VARIAMOLS group The Italian Agency for the Promotion of European Research (APRE) covered the VARIAMOLS group in an interview to the project PI Raffaello Potestio in the June 2020 issue of APREmagazine. The issue can be downloaded here (page 38, in Italian only). |
 | 20-31 January 2020 Winter school on the Physics of the Cell (link here) The aim of this school was to provide the flavour of the typical problems one faces in the computer-aided investigation of biological systems, as well as an overview of the most common and effective instruments employed to this end. Students have been exposed to lectures focusing on specific aspects of biophysics, held by researchers actively working on them in top international institutions; they received training in the usage of the software programs implementing algorithms and methods for the investigation of biological matter, from single atoms to proteins, small DNA strands, entire chromosomes, cellular membranes, to multicellular tissues. |
| The 2019 activity report of the Statistical and Biological Physics group of the University of Trento has been made available. You can download it here. |
 | 15-19 July 2019 X Brazilian Meeting on Simulational Physics (link here) Raffaello Potestio attended the meeting and delivered a talk titled “On the algorithmic identification of optimal coarse-grained representations of biomolecular structures” |
 | July 2019 SBP seminar by prof. Davide Donadio, University of California Davis Talk title: “Chemistry at ice surfaces: from solvation free energies to photolysis of organic pollutants” |
 | May 2019 Lectures and talk by prof. M. Scott Shell (UCSB) Prof. Shell from the University of California Santa Barbara has visited our group and delivered two topic lectures on modern techniques for molecular simulations and a talk on his recent work. |
| The 2018 activity report of the Statistical and Biological Physics group of the University of Trento has been made available. You can download it here. |
 | September 3-6, 2018 CECAM workshop “Computational biophysics on your desktop: is that possible?” The workshop is co-organized by the Physics department of the University of Trento, TIFPA, SISSA and the VARIAMOLS project. Please find more information at this link. |
 | September 24-25, 2018 Theo Murphy international scientific meeting “Multi-resolution simulations of intracellular processes” The event is co-organised by Radek Erban, Sarah Harris and Raffaello Potestio. It will take place at Chicheley Hall, Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire (UK). Find out more at this link. |
 | March 14, 2018 In the framework of the Biophysics Week organised by the Biophysical Society, the Physics Dept. of the University of Trento hosted the event “Biofisica: opportunità di studio e lavoro a Trento” (Biophysics: study and work opportunities in Trento). In this context, several groups in the area of Trento, active in the broad field of biophysics, have presented themselves and showcased various opportunities for master study, PhD programmes, and jobs in academia and industry. |
 | February 20, 2018 Raffaello Potestio to the IUPAC MODSIM workshop 2018 Modelling and simulation of large molecules: can we disentangle time- and length-scales? at the Politecnico of Milan, Italy. |
 | February 7-10, 2018 Raffaello Potestio participated to the 5th workshop Physics of Biomolecules: structure, dynamics, and function in Bressanone, Italy. |
| October 12, 2017 In a press conference (press release in Italian here) the University of Trento has presented the results obtained in ten years of ERC program, summing up to 24 ERC grants. The VARIAMOLS project is one of the two most recent ones. The regional RAI news of Trentino Alto Adige has reported the story (here, minute 6:22, in Italian). Here are the articles in the regional newspapers Il Dolomiti, Il Trentino, Trentino Corriere delle Alpi and La Voce del Trentino. | |
| October 5, 2017 Press release from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research about the VARIAMOLS project. | |
| September 13, 2017 The VARIAMOLS project has its Facebook page! Curious? Click here! | |
| September 6, 2017 The European Research Council has released the list of ERC StG projects from the 2017 call that will be funded. We’re there! 🙂 Find out more here. |