Born in Bangalore (India), Venkat obtained his M.S. (Pharm.) in Pharmacoinformatics from NIPER (S.A.S. Nagar, India) in 2013. He then joined the University of Cagliari (Italy) as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow (ITN ‘Translocation’ project) for his doctoral research. During his PhD (Physics) supervised by Prof Paolo Ruggerone, he employed structural bioinformatics and molecular modelling methods to characterize the structural and dynamic features of the substrate recognition and transport pathways of bacterial multidrug efflux pumps. This nurtured spin-off projects on which he continued working as a post-doctoral fellow funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) Project. Later, he worked on characterising the homo-oligomerization profiles of the multifunctional Ebola virus VP35 protein using a combination of computational methods.
His expertise includes molecular modelling techniques like homology modelling, molecular docking, molecular dynamics to study protein dynamics and protein-ligand interactions for applications in drug design. He has also developed a few cheminformatics software tools and contributed to the development of the MPDS software toolset.
Degiacomi research group 