Dr. Franca Fraternali

Biography

Professor Franca Fraternali is a computational biologist and biophysicist whose research integrates molecular modeling and artificial intelligence 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 for postdoctoral research at EMBL in Strasbourg and Heidelberg. She joined the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in London to work in the Mathematical Division as a staff scientist before moving to King’s College London to establish her own research group. In 2013, she became a Professor of Computational Bioinformatics and then Head of the Randall Centre for Structural Molecular Biophysics in 2018. In 2022, she was appointed Chair of Integrative Computational Biology at University College London (UCL), directing the Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology and since 2025, she has headed the Structure and Molecular Biology Department in the Division of Biosciences. Her internationally recognized work bridges computational modeling and immunology, pioneering AI-driven methods for antibody dynamics, nanocarrier design, and B-cell immune regulation.

Research Interests

Experience