Giulia Palermo, a computational biophysicist and associate professor in UCR’s Department of Bioengineering, has received a 2024 Camille & Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, given to faculty who “are within the first five years of their academic careers, have each created an outstanding independent body of scholarship, and are deeply committed to education.”

Palermo earned a doctorate from the Italian Institute of Technology in 2013. During her doctoral studies, she was awarded an early career fellowship to join the group of Ursula Roethlisberger at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. In 2016, she became a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego, working with J. Andrew McCammon and funded by a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship. 

Her group is known for computational studies of the CRISPR-Cas9 system. By using state-of-the-art computer simulations, her lab studies emerging genome editing systems. Among many acknowledgments, Palermo is a recipient of the 2020 Corwin Hansch Award to Outstanding Scientists Under 40, a 2022 NSF CAREER Award, and a 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry.