I  am interested in understanding the mechanisms of gene expression regulation in development and pathology, with the long-term goal of bringing research discoveries to clinical uses. 

I graduated from the University of Pisa in 2013 with a master's in molecular and cellular biology and a thesis on genetics, DNA damage repair, and breast cancer. Then, I moved to Milan to the European School of Molecular Medicine (SEMM), where in 2019, at the European Institute of Oncology (IEO), I achieved my PhD in System Medicine, awarded by SEMM and the University of Milano, under the mentorship of Giuseppe Testa. I focused on studying neurodevelopmental disorders caused by mutations in chromatin regulators. There, with patient-derived iPSCs, we modeled neurodevelopmental conditions in disease-relevant tissues to identify the downstream molecular effects. We also discovered that mutations in the chromatin regulator YY1 cause a neurodevelopmental disorder later identified as Gabriele de-Vries syndrome (go here for more information if you are a relative or doctor of an individual with Gabriele de-Vries syndrome). 

After my PhD, I wanted to set up a system to study the mechanisms responsible for chromatin-related diseases. For this reason, I moved to MIT biological engineering and I joined the biophysics laboratory of Anders Hansen. There, I established a new approach to study chromatin dynamics in living cells with 3D super-resolution live cell imaging. In this process, we discovered that fully looped topologically associated domains (TADs) created by CTCF and cohesin are rare and transitory.   Then, funded by a K99 pathway to independence award, I developed an experimental platform to study enhancer-promoter interaction dynamics during differentiation. 

After my experience in the USA, I decided to return to Italy at the San Raffaele Telethon Insitute for Gene Teraphy, in Milan, to carry on my research and start to build the explore chromatin regulation for therapeutical approaches.