Say hi to our team

Damiano Piovesan is a highly accomplished professional in computational biology, holding a Ph.D. in bioinformatics and over a decade of research experience. As an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Padua, his work focuses on the structural and functional aspects of complex biological systems, with a particular emphasis on non-globular proteins and modern machine learning approaches. He has developed software tools to predict protein features and has been actively involved in international initiatives aimed at standardizing data and promoting best practices for unbiased modeling. His research has recently expanded to investigate the critical link between cancer and intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). Beyond his research, he is committed to training the next generation of data scientists, teaching courses in structural bioinformatics and biological data.

Maria Cristina Aspromonte is the co-lead of the ELIXIR IDP Community (Italy and Europe). She has been an Assistant Professor (RTDa) in Biochemistry at the Department of Biomedical Sciences of the University of Padova since March 2023. She obtained her PhD in Developmental Medicine and Health Planning Sciences in 2021. During her PhD, she specialized in experimental setups and genome analysis of genetic pediatric diseases, particularly neurodevelopmental disorders. She has also focused on structural biology, with specific expertise in the characterization, interpretation, and standardization of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) and intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs). She is the manager of one of the major manually curated databases of IDPs/IDRs, which is a service of the ELIXIR IDP Community and part of the ELIXIR infrastructure. She is also directly involved in the collaborations of the ELIXIR IDP Community and with other consortia (Gene Ontology, HUPO-PSI), as well as in ELIXIR Implementation Studies.