Giulia Palermo is a computational biophysicist, Assistant Professor at the University of California Riverside in the Department of Bioengineering and Chemistry.
Giulia is a native of Italy where she earned her PhD in 2013 from the Italian Institute of Technology. Her graduate studies led to more than 10 first-author papers, drawing on molecular dynamics and quantum chemistry 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 computational studies of protein/nucleic acid complexes, focusing on chromatin biophysics 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, a member of the National Academy of Science and founder of the field, at the University of California San Diego. At UCSD, she pioneered computational studies of CRISPR-Cas9, publishing the first molecular dynamics simulation study. Her lab uses state-of-the-art computational methods to study dynamics and mechanisms of novel CRISPR-Cas gene-editing systems, with focus on conformational activation, catalysis and specificity.