Biographical Sketch
Born and raised in Rome (Italy), she has always been curious and fascinated by multiple disciplines at school but during her scientific high school years, she understood her true passion for science, in particular for biology and medicine.
So, guided by that, she pursued a Bachelor degree in Biology at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” that provided her general biology and molecular biology basic knowledge but also it started her to the biomedical research.
For these reasons, she decided to start a Master in Genetics and molecular biology at the same university. During her Master, she had the opportunity to spend two semesters abroad, first in Germany, where she got a stronger bioinformatic background, and then, in Houston (Texas, USA), where she completed the last 6 months of her one-year-master internship thanks to a new-born collaboration between the MDAnderson Cancer Center and the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. During this one-year internship she could learn from her PI Prof.George Calin (USA) and Prof. Rita Mancini (IT) and their teams all the essential methods and research technics, improving her trouble-shooting capacity, research independency, and scientific writing skills. The goal of her Master thesis was to determine the potential role of ROR1-AS1 lncRNA in skin cutaneous melanoma.
During her US stay she applied for the TrainCDKis projects, and few months later she got accepted as PhD student in one of the TrainCDKis projects in the Charité-Universitatmedizin Berlin, in collaboration with Oxford University.
The main focus of her project is to investigate and test the induction of selective apoptosis in cystic lining cells by drug inhibition of the AspH protein, in order to ameliorate the cystic phenotype in ADPKD. In fact, AspH protein resulted to be upregulated in ADPKD mouse and human cells and it’s a regulator of Notch signaling pathway that is known as a key pathway for renal cyst growth in ADPKD.