Role
Tenured Senior Researcher and Principal Investigator in the Synthetic and Systems Biology for Biomedicine Laboratory at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Naples. Associate Director for the IIT Centers of the Network.
Bio
A graduate in Medical Biotechnology from the University of Naples Federico II, she earned a PhD in Human Genetics from the Open University (UK) in 2012, conducted at the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine (TIGEM) in Naples. From 2012 to 2015, she worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Ron Weiss's laboratory. In 2015, she began independent research at Imperial College London, where she is an Honorary Research Fellow. Since September 2017, she has directed the Synthetic and Systems Biology for Biomedicine Laboratory at IIT in Naples.
His research develops genetic circuits to program immune cells and improve their ability to recognize and fight tumors. He studies T lymphocytes and macrophages in particular to make immunotherapies more precise and overcome the conditions that limit their effectiveness in solid tumors. He integrates synthetic biology, immunology, and computational tools. In 2026, his group published in Nature Communications a platform of synthetic promoters that function as genetic switches sensitive to the status of T lymphocytes. In the Journal of Biological Engineering, he described a synthetic receptor that recognizes PD-L1 and activates programmable responses in a macrophage cell model, increasing tumor cell engulfment in vitro.
She was selected to the Global Young Academy in 2019. Her awards include the MIT Young Innovator Award and the Galileo Galilei Award in 2018, being selected by Fortune Italia as one of the ten researchers under 40 to watch in 2019, InspiringFifty Italia, and being selected as one of the Unstoppable Women for Science and Innovation. She is an Associate Editor of npj Systems Biology and Applications and BioDesign Research and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of ACS Synthetic Biology. She is involved in scientific communication.