Professor Rosana Collepardo

Biography

Interdisciplinary Lecturer - Depts. of Genetics and Chemistry

Rosana studied chemistry at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and obtained an MSc and DPhil in Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof David Manolopoulos. She then did postdoctoral work at New York University as a Schlumberger Faculty for the Future Fellow with Prof Tamar Schlick, at the Institute for Biomedical Research-Barcelona Supercomputing Centre as a Marie Curie Fellow with Prof Modesto Orozco, and at the University of Cambridge joining the groups of Prof Daan Frenkel and David Wales.

In 2016 she started her group as a Winton Advanced Research Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory, and in 2019 obtained an ERC starting grant. Soon after, she moved to the Departments of Chemistry and Genetics as an Interdisciplinary Lecturer.

Rosana's main research interests lie in understanding the molecular mechanisms that determine the packaging of DNA insides cells, DNA structure, epigenetic phenomena, and the relationship between the structure of the genome and gene expression regulation. Her technical expertise is on molecular modelling, coarse-grained model development, atomistic simulations, multiscale modelling, and high-performance scientific computing. 

Research

We develop and apply novel multi-scale computational models to investigate the structure of the genome at the nanoscale level, in conditions mimicking those inside cells. Our research aims to link epigenomes with the specific chromatin nanostructures they lead to, and also to elucidate the molecular-level mechanisms behind such link. Our multi-scale computational models are anchored in all-atom molecular dynamics simulations, coarse-graining techniques, theory, and experiments from collaborators.

Research Group Links

https://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/research-groups/research-groups/collepardo-group

http://www.collepardolab.org/