My main research interest is to understand how proteins fold and how they function. While according to the Anfinsen's thermodynamic hypothesis protein folding is a thermodynamic process, thought by some to be driven by hydrophobic interactions, I follow Levinthal's proposal that folding is a kinetic process and that native states are only one of the many kinetic traps potentially available to the same sequence of amino acids. More generally, my  main hypothesis is that conformational changes (related to folding or function) are driven by quantum vibrational excited states (the VES hypothesis).