Francesco Stellato

In my scientific career I mainly worked on the application of synchrotron radiation techniques, including those recently developed specifically for Free Electron Laser sources, to the structural study of biological systems including peptides, proteins, viruses, cell organelles and cells.
I used several experimental techniques, namely X-ray diffraction, X-ray absorption spectroscopy and coherent X-ray imaging both to develop methodologies to study biological systems (serial crystallography, time resolved x-ray scattering and diffraction measurements, x-ray absorption spectroscopy on diluted samples) and to address biologically relevant problems (amyloidogenesis related to Alzheimer’s disease and transmissible spongiform encephalopathy). I also used ab initio quantum mechanical simulations to study the same biological systems and to the better evaluate the experimental results.