Profile

Paulo earned his Bachelor and Licentiate degrees in Chemistry from University of Campinas (Brazil) in 2007. Having a background in Physical-Chemistry, his training during the Masters (2009) and PhD (2013) at the same university was mainly in Molecular Biophysics. He applied computational and theoretical methods to biological problems with medical relevance. In particular, he gained experience in force-field parametrization and in computational studies involving nuclear receptors and kinases, which includes effects of disease related mutations, protein-protein interactions, protein conformational changes and protein-ligand interactions. As a postdoc researcher, Paulo was trained in one of the world-leading laboratories in Computational Biophysics, the Molecular Dynamics Group led by Prof. Siewert J. Marrink at the University of Groningen. He specialized in molecular simulations of water soluble proteins (as SOD1), but also learnt about modelling of lipid membranes, transmembrane proteins (Toll-like receptors, ECF transporters), DNA-lipid complexes, materials, and (bio)technological applications. Currently, he is one of the main developers of the third generation of Martini coarse-grained (CG) force-field, one of the most popular CG models in the world. In his free time, Paulo likes play videogames and also practice ballroom dance, in particular Brazilian styles as samba de gafieira and forró.