Paulo Cesar Telles de Souza

After completing my studies as a chemistry technician and working for 2 years in glass factory (a French company - Saint Gobain), I started my Bachelor and Licentiate degrees in Chemistry in 2003 at University of Campinas, one of top technological universities in Brazil and Latin America. I quickly developed an interesting in science, which encouraged me to start working with Prof. Munir S. Skaf. Having a background in Physical-Chemistry, my training during the Masters (2007-2009) and PhD (2009-2013) with Prof. Skaf was mainly in Molecular Biophysics. I applied computational and theoretical methods to biological problems with medical relevance. In particular, I gained experience in code development, 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. Most of these studies were carried out in exciting collaborations with experimental research groups, including biophysics, structural biologists, medicinal chemists and medical doctors. As a post-doc, I 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 (one of the top universities in Europe, located in the Netherlands). I specialized in molecular simulations of water soluble proteins (as SOD1), but also learnt about modelling of bilayers, transmembrane proteins (Toll-like receptors, ECF transporters, Signal Peptidase Complex-SPC), DNA-lipid complexes, materials, and (bio)technological applications. I am one of the main developers of the new generation of Martini coarse-grained (CG) force-field, one of the most popular CG models in the world. In collaborations with 9 other research groups, we just finished a new version of Martini in 2021, called Martini 3. The new model allows more accurate predictions of molecular packing and interactions in general, with potential new applications to drug design, which is now part of my future research plans in CNRS (Lyon, France), in collaboration with companies and other research teams around the world. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)