Franca Fraternali, PhD

Head of Research Department at University College London

Speaker

Professor Franca Fraternali is a computational biologist and biophysicist whose research integrates molecular modelling, AI, and systems immunology to understand and engineer biological interactions. She studied Chemistry at the University of Naples and earned her PhD in Physical Chemistry between Naples and ETH Zürich, followed by an EMBO Fellowship at ETH and postdoctoral research at Strasbourg and EMBL Heidelberg. After joining the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in London to work in the Mathematical Division as staff scientist, she moved to King’s College London,to establish her own group. She became Professor in Compuational Bioinformatics in 2013, and Head of the Randall Centre for Structural and Molecular Biophysics in 2018. She got a Satellite group position at the Crick Institute in 20019. In 2022, she was appointed Chair of Integrative Computational Biology at UCL, to direct the Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology and since 2025 she is Head of the Structure and Molecular Biology Department in the Division of Biosciences. Her internationally recognised work bridges computational modelling and immunology, pioneering AI-driven methods for antibody dynamics, nanocarrier design, and B-cell immune regulation.