Alessandro Laio
Full Professor in Statistical and Biological Physics at SISSA, Trieste.
Full Professor in Statistical and Biological Physics at SISSA, Trieste. He is also Scientific Consultant of the International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste. He obtained a Ph.D. in solid state physics at SISSA in 1999. Afterwards he spent six years as a postdoc at ETH, Switzerland, where he worked first on the development of a multiscale approach to molecular biochemistry and then on the development of techniques for computer simulations of rare events. Between 2016 and 2019 he has been the president of CECAM, Lausanne. He is the author of ~130 articles in prestigious international journals. In 2002, together with M. Parrinello, he introduced metadynamics, a powerful approach to explore free energy landscapes characterized by metastability. His current research interests are the development of machine learning techniques for analyzing complex data landscapes, and the development of algorithms for enhanced sampling in molecular simulations. In this field his most important contribution is Density Peak Clustering, published in 2014 together with A. Rodriguez.
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