Walter Rocchia graduated cum laude in Electronic Engineering on July 1996, with a thesis on Quantum Computing. In February 2000, he got a PhD in Electronic Devices at the University of Trento. He then was a Research Scholar at the Biochemistry Department of the Columbia University, developing models to calculate the electrostatic field generated by biological macromolecules in solution. As a consultant in the Corporate Technology Centre at Honeywell Int (NJ, USA), and then at the Bioengineering Research Centre "E. Piaggio" of University of Pisa he studied the modeling of the physical properties of actuating polymers and nanotubes in a wet environment. In 2003 he joined the Molecular Biophysics group of National Enterprise for nanoScience and Nanotechnology (NEST-INFM-CNR), at Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, working on molecular recognition and targeting. There, he extended his interests from algorithms for speeding up and making more accurate the calculation of the electrostatic interaction energy of biomolecules to Bioinformatic and Biostatistical techniques aimed at identifying targets and engineering molecules involved in biochemical pathways of medical relevance.
In 2008, he moved to the Drug Discovery and Development Department of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), working on computational approaches to ligand-protein binding free energy estimation. In 2010 he was awarded, together with the Clemson University, a NIH 5-years grant entitled: DelPhi: Software for Electrostatic Modeling of Biomolecules and Objects.
In 2014, he created the Computational mOdelling of NanosCalE and bioPhysical sysTems (CONCEPT) Lab and co-founded the BiKi Technologies company.
He is author of more than 100 publications including International Journals, book contributions and Proceedings.
