Paola Picotti (born 1977) is an Italian biochemist who is Professor for Molecular Systems Biology at ETH Zürich.

She joined the laboratory of Ruedi Aebersold as a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Molecular Systems Biology at ETH Zürich, where she developed approaches for the targeted analysis of proteins based on mass spectrometry.

Whilst proteomics offers the potential for wide-reaching analysis, detail on the structures or shapes of proteins is lost in the process.

[6] Picotti developed an approach that solves this problem, since it enables the analysis of the structures of thousands of proteins simultaneously.

It combines limited proteolysis and mass spectrometry (so-called "LiP-MS" method), to generate a proteolytic pattern (akin to a barcode) that reports on the structure of every measurable protein in a sample.