Chiara Pallara

Senior Project Manager

Dr. Chiara Pallara graduated in Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Technology from the University of Bologna in 2009, completing her thesis in the Computational Chemistry Group led by Dr. Andrea Cavalli and working on different receptor-based virtual screening pipelines, such as fragment-based drug discovery and umbrella sampling-based undocking. In 2016, she obtained her PhD in Biomedicine by the University of Barcelona (UB), finalizing her thesis in the Protein Interaction and Docking (PID) group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) led by Dr. Juan Fernández-Recio and focusing on several state-of-the-art molecular modeling techniques such as molecular dynamics, protein-protein docking, protein binding site predictions, protein structure modeling. From 2016 to 2019, Chiara worked in Iproteos, a biotechnology company specialized in the design of peptidomimetic drugs with high permeability across biological barriers.

Chiara’s major research line has been focused on the development of new protein-protein and protein-peptide docking protocols and the application of molecular modeling methods to study different biological processes, such as protein-ligand binding, protein-protein association and pathological mutations effects. In addition, she regularly participated in CAPRI (Critical Assessment of PRediction of Interactions), a worldwide community experiment for the evaluation of protein-protein docking methods, achieving excellent results both in the 5th and 6th editions.

Chiara overall research activity has produced a total of 15 scientific articles (five as first author), 13 of which published in international peer-reviewed first quartile (Q1) journals with impact factor between 2.9 and 9.7 (as indexed in ISI) and one patent,that was recently filed to the European Patent Office EPO. Chiara is currently working at Nostrum Biodiscovery as Project Manager.

She currently holds a Torres Quevedo grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.