Emilio Gallicchio Bio

Emilio Gallicchio was born in 1966 in Potenza, Italy, in the region of Basilicata, also known as Lucania. He graduated in Theoretical Chemistry from the University of Basilicata, Italy, in 1991 under the mentorship of Professor Franco Battaglia. His thesis project of Laurea was in the field of vibro-rotational spectroscopy "Costruzione Numerica di Potenzial Born-Oppenheimer di Molecole Biatomiche mediante una Procedura d'Inversione" ("Numerical construction of Born-Oppenheimer interatomic potentials of diatomic molecules by means of an inversion procedure"). Professor Battaglia encouraged him to travel to New York City to continue his studies at Columbia University. He entered the Ph.D. program in Chemical Physics at Columbia University in 1991 and joined the laboratory of Professor Bruce Berne in 1992.

    At Columbia University he obtained the Master of Arts degree in Chemistry in 1992 and the Master of Philosophy in Chemical Physics in 1995. He received the Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from Columbia University in 1996 for the thesis project "Quantum Dynamics in Condensed Phases by Maximum Entropy Analytic Continuation of Euclidean Time Path Integrals" under the mentorship of Professor Bruce Berne. While in the group of Professor Berne he authored or co-authored four research papers in the area of the modeling of quantum dynamical processes.

    After graduation, Emilio Gallicchio joined the group of Professor Ronald Levy at Rutgers University for postdoctoral research work in the area of computational molecular biophysics. He continued his research and graduate teaching activities at Rutgers University in various capacities until 2013. He was the Director of Information Technology and High-Performance Computing at the BioMaPS Institute for Quantitative Biology at Rutgers University from 2003 to 2012. During his last year at Rutgers University, he assumed the position of Research Professor at the Department of Chemistry. While at Rutgers University he authored or co-authored more than fifty research papers mostly in collaboration with Professor Ronald Levy, as well as Professor Eddy Arnold and others.

    Starting in 2000, he was part of a then small team of scientists who contributed to the founding of Schrodinger LLC, now a major provider of drug discovery software to pharmaceutical companies worldwide. Emilio Gallicchio wrote the first set of libraries to link the Maestro GUI to the Impact molecular mechanics engine which formed the basis of Glide, now one of the most successful docking program on the market. He also contributed to Prime-X and, among many other contributions, wrote the libraries to allow Maestro to display "crystal mates", which are still in use today.

    In 2013 Emilio Gallicchio joined the Department of Chemistry at CUNY Brooklyn College as a full-time faculty with the title of Assistant Professor. At Brooklyn College, he directs the Computational Molecular Biophysics Laboratory which hosts two graduate students and undergraduate students. The lab has produced popular software packages and many peer-reviewed publications so far in collaboration with medicinal chemistry laboratories at CUNY and elsewhere. For a snapshot of recent research and educational activities visit our News page, Research Blog, and List of Publications.

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