Before the COVID-19 pandemic, viruses were not a major priority for the scientific community. Today, many events have changed the world and the importance of studying viruses, vaccines, and antiviral drugs is fully appreciated. The development of effective ...
Robotics is entering our daily lives. The discipline is increasingly crucial in fields such as agriculture, medicine, and rescue operations, impacting our food, health, and planet. At the same time, it is becoming evident that robotic research must embrace ...
The field of protein design has made remarkable progress over the past decade. Historically, the low reliability of purely structure-based design methods limited their application, but recent strategies that combine structure-based and sequence-based calcu ...
The design and discovery of potential novel materials is critical for the advancement of climate change mitigation technologies. In this respect, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have received considerable attention over the last two decades. The combinatio ...
Vaccine technology is still facing challenges regarding some infectious diseases, which can be addressed by innovative drug delivery systems. In particular, nanoparticle-based vaccines combined with new types of adjuvants are actively explored as a platfor ...
The presence of competing events, such as death, makes it challenging to define causal effects on recurrent outcomes. In this thesis, I formalize causal inference for recurrent events, with and without competing events. I define several causal estimands an ...
Proteins are the basic building blocks necessary for the operation and regulation of virtually all functions in living organisms. Over millions of years, evolution has created a vast repertoire of proteins finely tuned to execute their biological functions ...
Advances in additive manufacturing have enabled a new generation of materials with advantageous properties inherent to their architecture. Recently, architected materials with periodic arrangements of plates, called plate-lattice materials, have been devel ...
Many natural materials are structured on different length scales. This structuring often leads to an intricate interplay between soft and stiff components, which significantly improves the fracture toughness of these materials. A class of soft material tha ...
Recent advances in the field of nanomaterials demonstrated how their use for vaccination can drastically improve immune responses, mainly by enhancing delivery and uptake of vaccine components. However, our understanding of the connections between presenta ...
