Francesco graduated from SISSA/ISAS in Trieste - Italy, where he designed and applied statistical tools to model protein dynamics. He then worked as Postdoctoral Associate at Brandeis University, where he conducted research on functional conformational transitions in bacterial signaling proteins and protein kinases.

Publications

• Pontiggia, F., Zen, A. and Micheletti, C., 2008. Small-and large-scale conformational changes of adenylate kinase: a molecular dynamics study of the subdomain motion and mechanics. Biophysical journal, 95(12), pp.5901-5912.
• Zorba, A., Buosi, V., Kutter, S., Kern, N., Pontiggia, F., Cho, Y.J. and Kern, D., 2014. Molecular mechanism of Aurora A kinase autophosphorylation and its allosteric activation by TPX2. Elife, 3, p.e02667.
• Potestio, R., Pontiggia, F. and Micheletti, C., 2009. Coarse-grained description of protein internal dynamics: an optimal strategy for decomposing proteins in rigid subunits. Biophysical journal, 96(12), pp.4993-5002.
• Kerns, S.J., Agafonov, R.V., Cho, Y.J., Pontiggia, F., Otten, R., Pachov, D.V., Kutter, S., Phung, L.A., Murphy, P.N., Thai, V. and Alber, T., 2015. The energy landscape of adenylate kinase during catalysis. Nature structural & molecular biology, 22(2), p.124.
• Pontiggia, F., Colombo, G., Micheletti, C. and Orland, H., 2007. Anharmonicity and self-similarity of the free energy landscape of protein G. Physical review letters, 98(4), p.048102.
• Aleksiev, T., Potestio, R., Pontiggia, F., Cozzini, S. and Micheletti, C., 2009. PiSQRD: a web server for decomposing proteins into quasi-rigid dynamical domains. Bioinformatics, 25(20), pp.2743-2744.
• Pontiggia, F., Pachov, D.V., Clarkson, M.W., Villali, J., Hagan, M.F., Pande, V.S. and Kern, D., 2015. Free energy landscape of activation in a signalling protein at atomic resolution. Nature communications, 6, p.7284.
• Potestio, R., Aleksiev, T., Pontiggia, F., Cozzini, S. and Micheletti, C., 2010. ALADYN: a web server for aligning proteins by matching their large-scale motion. Nucleic acids research, 38(suppl_2), pp.W41-W45.
• Capozzi, F., Luchinat, C., Micheletti, C. and Pontiggia, F., 2007. Essential dynamics of helices provide a functional classification of EF-hand proteins. Journal of proteome research, 6(11), pp.4245-4255.
• Carnevale, V., Pontiggia, F. and Micheletti, C., 2007. Structural and dynamical alignment of enzymes with partial structural similarity. 
• Villali, J., Pontiggia, F., Clarkson, M.W., Hagan, M.F. and Kern, D., 2014. Evidence against the “Y–T coupling” mechanism of activation in the response regulator NtrC. Journal of molecular biology, 426(7), pp.1554-1567.
• Chakrabarti, K.S., Agafonov, R.V., Pontiggia, F., Otten, R., Higgins, M.K., Schertler, G.F., Oprian, D.D. and Kern, D., 2016. Conformational selection in a protein-protein interaction revealed by dynamic pathway analysis. Cell reports, 14(1), pp.32-42.
• Pontiggia, F., 2008. Protein structure and functionally-oriented dynamics: from atomistic to coarse-grained models (Doctoral dissertation).
•  Carnevale, V., Micheletti, C., Pontiggia, F. and Potestio, R., 2011. Bridging the Atomic and Coarse-Grained Descriptions of Collective Motions in Proteins. In Multiscale Approaches to Protein Modeling (pp. 159-178). Springer, New York, NY.
• Pontiggia, F., Pachov, D.V., Clarkson, M.W., Villali, J., Hagan, M.F., Pande, V.S. and Kern, D., 2015. Activation Mechanism of a Signaling Protein at Atomic Resolution. Biophysical Journal, 108(2), p.376a.
• Potestio, R., Pontiggia, F., Aleksiev, T., Cozzini, S. and Micheletti, C., 2010. Pisqrd: A Novel Variational Scheme to Identify Dinamical Domains in Proteins. Biophysical Journal, 98(3), p.237a.