About us

The University of Padua (UniPD) was founded in 1222 to defend academic and teaching freedom and to date is one of the oldest universities in Europe with world's leading research. The schools of Physics and Medicine, in particular, at UniPD have a centenary tradition in advancing human knowledge and achieving scientific excellence.

UniPD currently hosts several top research laboratories actively working on multiple aspects of human life and disease from a multifaceted perspective – ranging from systems medicine to computational biology – involving the departments of Molecular Medicine, Medicine, Biomedical Sciences, Neuroscience and Information Engineering, to cite a few emblematic ones. In parallel, the Department of Physics in the last years has fostered research groups and activities on complex systems, from cells to ecosystems, while hosting research labs specialized in Network Science to strengthen its position on foundational aspects of interacting and interdependent systems, from cells to societies.

Teatro anatomico di Padova. Picture: Massimo Pistore, Università di Padova © all rights reserved

The Padua Center for Network Medicine is an excellence research center integrating most of the ongoing activities within a unique interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary effort. Our goal is to foster a collaborative environment where wet-lab and dry-lab research activities advance together. Our research spans from the identification of pathogenetic processes to the identification of diagnosis biomarkers, from patients clustering and design of targeted therapy, to characterizing population dynamics during epidemic outbreaks or a pandemic, while accounting for underlying comorbidities, human behavior and social dynamics stratified by age groups.

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided us with a critical stress test of our knowledge systems and our preparedness to real-time challenges of precision medicine. In fact, this global health crisis has revealed that there is still a significant gap between the computational analysis of living systems – with their in-silico predictions – and preclinical and clinical research – with their in-vivo applications. The Padua Center for Network Medicine at UniPD has the ambitious goal of filling this gap, by linking micro to macro scales, with scientific research excellence.

Mission

The priorities of the center include:

• developing computational techniques based on complex multilayer networks, a robust paradigm in Network Science which has found interesting applications in Network Medicine and Systems Biology but whose potential has not been fully exploited yet;
• connecting computational research with preclinical and clinical research, by establishing novel integration protocols between dry and wet labs;
• promoting interdisciplinary research and teaching courses to stretch the more traditional boundaries of single departments and research centers;
• expanding the current research activities and network of collaborations with national and international public and private organizations;
• becoming an even more attracting hub for Network Medicine scientists and a reference for science-informed global health policy.

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Highlights