A science talk taking you from the world of atoms to the future of medicines
New Paths of Science
- Participant
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Aritz Leonardo
EHU, DIPC - When
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2026/10/27
19:00 - Place
- Ernest Lluch K.E. (Pº de Anoeta 13, Donostia / San Sebastián)
- Organizers
- Donostia Kultura (Ernest LLuch K.E.), DIPC
- Add to calendar
-
iCal
Can we design a drug before entering the laboratory? Is it possible to observe how a protein moves, atom by atom, or to predict, using artificial intelligence, whether a mutation could cause a disease?
As part of the “New Paths of Science” programme, Aritz Leonardo, a professor and researcher at the University of the Basque Country (EHU) and DIPC associate, will give a science talk in Basque entitled “From Atoms to Medicines: Artificial Intelligence and Supercomputing to Understand Life.”
In this talk, we will explore how physics, biology, and computer science come together to tackle some of the most complex challenges in biomedicine.
We will discuss the in silico design of drugs, the application of artificial intelligence to proteins, and molecular dynamics simulations that require millions of calculations and powerful supercomputers. We will also look at why some of these challenges are pushing classical computing to its limits, and what role quantum computing could play in the future.
We will illustrate all of this through two real projects from our research group: our work on the KCNQ2 and ARC proteins. ARC is a fascinating protein that may hold new clues to understanding how neurodegenerative diseases spread.
About the speaker
Aritz Leonardo Liceranzu (Bilbao, 1979) is a physicist and professor at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), where he carries out his teaching and research activities. He completed his PhD at the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) and has developed most of his scientific career in the field of computational condensed matter physics, using simulation, scientific programming, and high-performance computing as key tools. He has also worked at the University of Missouri and ESS-Bilbao, participating in projects related to materials, semiconductors, and particle accelerators. In recent years, a significant part of his research has focused on computational biophysics, applying molecular dynamics, artificial intelligence, and supercomputing to the study of proteins and the design of new drugs. He currently leads projects related to neuroscience and neurodegenerative diseases and is the founder of BioComputing, a company created to bring these computational technologies to real-world challenges in biomedicine.