The Department of Biochemistry's weekly BCH 252 seminar series is presented this week by

Giulia Palermo, Associate Professor of Bioengineering, UC Riverside

Seminar Title: "Dynamics and Mechanisms of CRISPR-Cas9 Through the Lens of Computational Methods"

Abstract: Giulia Palermo is a computational biophysicist, Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside in the Department of Bioengineering and Chemistry.
She is a native of Italy where she earned her PhD in 2013 from the Italian Institute of Technology working with Dr. Marco De Vivo. Her graduate studies led to more than 10 first-author papers, drawing on quantum chemistry and mixed quantum-classical methods to explore the mechanistic function of a number of enzymes. During her two-year post-doc at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in the group of Prof. Ursula Rothlisberger, she initiated studies of allostery in proteins and nucleic acids, focusing on chromatin drug development and on the mechanism of RNA splicing by the spliceosome.
In 2016, she was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation (NSF) post-doctoral fellowship to join the group of Prof. J. Andrew McCammon at the University of California San Diego. At UCSD, she worked on novel multiscale approaches and enhanced simulations to enable studying increasingly realistic biological systems obtained through cryo-EM and tomography. Her interests focus on understanding dynamics and mechanisms of novel CRISPR-Cas gene-editing systems that are transformative for life sciences.

Seminar Host: Dr. Seán O'Leary; sean.oleary@ucr.edu