Curriculum Vitae
Educational Background: RC, 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.
Professional Experience: After working in Laboratories of
Biophysics both in the United States and in Germany, in 1987 RC
became Assistant Professor of Biophysics at the University of
Bologna Italy. Since 1/10/2003 is full professor of
Biochemistry/Biophysics in the same University, RC has been working
mainly in the fields of 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
modelling of relevant biological processes, such as protein folding
and modelling. One major field of research is the application of
machine learning methods to the prediction of secondary and
tertiary structure of proteins from their aminoacid residue
sequences, particularly of membrane proteins and their
transmembrane topology. one active research field is the annotation
of mutations disease related and the prediction of their role at
the level od structural systems biology. Presently she is the
group leader of the Biocoputing Unit of the Interdipartimental
Centre for Biotechnological Researches (CIRB) of the University of
Bologna, Italy and her researches are devoted to different aspects
of protein modelling, including prediction of secondary and
tertiary structures with neural networks, hidden Markov models,
genetic algorithms, molecular docking, protein reaction mechanisms
and de novo design of helical peptides (for details see
http://lipid.biocomp.unibo.it). At present the focus is mainly the
implementation of integrated platforms for genome/proteome
annotation, sequence annotation after alternative splicing in the
human proteome, prediction of the relation of protein folding,
misfolding and deseases in humans, search for SNPs in different
genomes and their validation. RC is the author of about 200
scientific papers and presented her work at several (over 300)
national and international meetings (for details see http://lipid.biocomp.unibo.it/casadio/cv.html).
Other Activities: RC with the Biocomputing Unit is active
in organizing International Schools on Bioinformatics. She
co-chaired WABI 2005, and act as Associate Editor for Advances in
Bioinformatics, BMC Research Notes, she is in the Editorial board
of BMC Bioinformatics and BioData Mining. Presently she is
president of the Bologna International Master in Bioinformatics;
she is also member of the board of directors of I.N.B.B, an Italian
InterUniversity Consortium, acting as a representative of the
Italian Minister of MIUR; of ISCB, the International Society of
Computational Biology; of the Italian Society of Bioinformatics.
Recently she was appointed correspondent member of the Accademia
delle Scienze dell'Istituto di Bologna.