Role
Associate Director and Senior Scientific Leader at GSK.
Bio
After graduating in Biophysics from the University of Tor Vergata in 1993, he specialized in Structural Biology of Plant Proteins at the CRIBI of the University of Padua. He then continued his doctoral work in the EMBL laboratories and in 1998 obtained his PhD in Structural Biology from the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg.
During his training, he carried out research periods abroad: in 1996 at the Department of Virology of the Medical University of Vienna, in 1998 as a post-doctoral fellow at the Children's Hospital of Harvard Medical School in Boston and, since 1999, at the Department of Structural Virology of the CNRS in Gif-sur-Yvette, also collaborating with the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
Since 2004, he has worked at the GSK research center in Siena, formerly Novartis, where he has held roles of increasing scientific responsibility. He currently serves as Associate Director and Senior Scientific Leader, leading the Structural Vaccinology section, a cutting-edge department that combines structural biology, cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), and artificial intelligence models applied to vaccine development.
Her interests include the correlation between the structure and function of bacterial and viral surface proteins . She developed Structural Vaccinology, an approach that, starting from the three-dimensional structure, identifies effective epitopes and engineers them to make them more immunogenic as vaccines . This method supported the development of Bexsero™ against meningococcus B and continues to be applied to bacterial and viral human pathogens. She has also developed several AI-based software programs dedicated to the identification of new vaccines. She is the co-founder of WeInspireBio, a women's network dedicated to women in Structural Biology.