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Rita Casadio obtained her degree in Physics and, in 1987, became Assistant Professor of Biophysics at the University of Bologna (Italy), where she served as Full Professor of Biochemistry, Bioinformatics, and Biophysics from October 2000 to October 2019. She is currently Alma Mater Professor and, since 2025, Associate Senior Researcher at IBIOM-CNR in Bari. Her research focuses on the development of computational methods for problem solving, including shallow and deep neural networks, embedding approaches, and protein language models. She is the author of approximately 370 scientific publications. IDs: ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7462-7039; Scopus Author ID: 7004943169; ResearcherID: K-4814-2015

Riccardo Percudani is a Professor at the Department of Chemistry, Life Sciences and Environmental Sustainability, University of Parma (Italy). His research lies at the intersection of Biochemistry and Bioinformatics, with a primary focus on developing computational methods to predict the function of uncharacterized genes and subsequently validating these predictions experimentally. The core expertise of his laboratory is the molecular identification of enzymes and metabolic pathways, leveraging big data analysis and evolutionary information to uncover biological functions.

Anna Marabotti is Deputy of the Training Platform of ELIXIR-IT. She obtained a PhD in Biochemical Sciences (2001) from the University of Turin, and she is Associate Professor at the Dept. Chemistry and Biology “A. Zambelli” of the University of Salerno. Her research interests concern studies of structure-dynamics-function relationships of proteins of prevalent interest in the biomedical field (with a special focus on proteins involved in rare diseases), and characterization of their interactions with ligands, using structural bioinformatics approaches.

Claudio focused his university studies in the field of Biology and has a PhD in Biomedical and Cytomorphological Sciences. PhD thesis entitled: Molecular basis of Noonan syndrome. Senior Researcher at the National Centre for Rare Diseases (RDs), Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Rome, Italy. He currently works on data management for RDs, particularly on data Findable Accessible Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) for humans and computers. ELIXIR-IT Local Technical Coordinator and co-lead community RDs.

Emidio Capriotti is an Associate Professor at the University of Bologna (Italy). He earned a PhD in Physical Sciences from the University of Bologna, with a scientific background in Structural Bioinformatics. In recent years, his research activity has shifted toward the study of the effects of single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) resulting in single amino acid polymorphisms. He applies computational tools for the analysis of protein three-dimensional structures to predict the impact of single-point protein mutations on protein stability, developing machine learning methods to predict free energy changes upon mutation and to identify pathogenic variants. The main goal of his research is to understand the relationship between genomic variations and disease by leveraging large amounts of data generated by high-throughput techniques. He is particularly interested in designing new disease-specific algorithms and developing novel tools for personal genomics and personalized medicine.