The University of Milan-Bicocca (UMB) was officially created in 1998 in Milan, that is recognized as one the four driving engines of Europe. Groups of professors and researchers from different scientific fields chose to come and participate in the new University project. The University of Milano-Bicocca covers several different disciplines, such as economy, statistics, environmental sciences, social sciences, law, physics, chemistry, geology, biology, informatics, mathematics, etc. The number of professors is about 550 and the number of researchers is about 370; the students are about 30,000. From the start, this very fertile climate became a unique training ground, offering something new, even for the most traditional disciplines. From the very outset the University of Milan-Bicocca began participating in international research and training programmes.
Prof. Roberto Todeschini is full professor of chemometrics at the Department of Environmental Sciences of the University of Milano-Bicocca (Milan, Italy). He is author of about 150 international publications and two books (one of them, ref. 1 was cited >1200 since its publication). The main research interests are chemometric methods, QSAR/QSPR, molecular descriptors, multicriteria decision making, artificial neural networks and the methods for variable selection. He also produced the software DRAGON for the calculation of more than 3000 theoretical molecular descriptors, that is used by many groups in the world. Prof. Todeschini is president of the International Academy of Mathematical Chemistry and president of the Italian Chemometrics Society. Among the last scientific results, he proposed the WHIM, G-WHIM and GETAWAY molecular descriptors as well as new classification the similarity/diversity methods. He is teaching chemometrics and experimental design and has organized several international and national chemometric schools and schools about molecular descriptors and QSAR modeling. The foreseen extent of involvement in percent of the full time employment is 20%.
1.Handbook of Molecular Descriptors, by R. Todeschini and V. Consonni; Wiley-VCH, 2000; 868 pp.
2.Molecular Descriptors for Chemoinformatics (2 volumes), by R. Todeschini and V. Consonni; Wiley-VCH, 2009; 1251 pp.
3.Todeschini R., Consonni V., Manganaro A., Ballabio D. and Mauri A. (2009). Canonical Measure of Correlation (CMC) and Canonical Measure of Distance (CMD) between sets of data. Part 1. Theory and simple chemometric applications. Anal.Chim.Acta, 648, 45-51.
4.Mauri, A.; Consonni, V.; Pavan. M.; Todeschini R. DRAGON software: an easy approach to molecular descriptors calculations. MATCH, 2006, 56, 237-248.
5.Pavan, M.; Consonni, V.; Todeschini, R. Partial Ranking Models by Genetic Algorithms Variable Subset Selection (GA-VSS) approach for environmental priority settings. MATCH, 2005, 40, 583-609.