The Statistical and Biological Chemistry Sector is devoted to the understanding of biological and cellular systems at the molecular and atomic level.

To characterize the physical-chemical properties of macromolecules, a variety of approaches are used, with a strong emphasis on the computational aspects, including structural bioinformatics, molecular dynamics simulation and statistical physics, but with the assistance of experimental methods, such as structural biology, nanobiotechnology, molecular and cellular biology.

These approaches are applied to a wide range of important biological and cellular systems, including basic biological processes and medically relevant problems. Collaborations with a network of biochemists, biologists and medical scientists, both locally and internationally, ensures constant feedback between theory and experimentation and provides the mean to test hypothesis derived from computation and/or chemical-physical approaches in the context of cellular biology.

The main lines of research include statistical physics, biomolecular simulations, structural bioinformatics, simulation of rare events, nanoscale biophysics and biotechnology, structural biology.

The sector is responsible for the PhD course in Physics and Chemistry of Biological Systems, which includes the following curricula:

- Drug discovery

- Statistical and computational modeling of soft matter

- Nanoscale biophysics and biotechnology

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