Education

I have alwayse had a scientific mindset. I have studied in Italy since I was a child. My scientific path started emerging at a young age, when I decided to study at the scientific high school LSS Bruno Touschek. During the 5 years of education in this high school I learned about biology, chemistry, physics and I was fascinated by the complexity of biological systems. It was during the lectures about DNA replication that I understood biology would be my future. I graduate from this high school with top marks, 100/100.

I studied Bioinformatics at Sapienza Università di Roma as a Bachelors degree. The course is tought in English, which gave us students the advantage of opening to the world-wide scientific community since the beginning. During the 3-years course I studied in depth about cellular biology and trained myself to learn how to program. The aim of the course is to prepare the students to tackle biological questions using the latest computational tools. I qualified from the course with 110/110 with honours.

Then I moved to the north of Italy to attend the Master’s programme in Quantitative and Computational Biology. It is during these 2 years that I learned the current bioinformatic approaches in different biological fields such as microbiology, cancer biology, plant genomics and others. Flanking these biological studies were computational courses, such as machine learning and data mining, that opened my mind to the power of computational research in the biological field. The course did not focus on any given biological area leaving us the flexibility to devote our future carreers on any topic of interest. I completed this course of study with maximum score, 100/100 with honours.

Overall, my education prepared me so that I would be able to share my knoledge with my coworkers, learn from them and activelly create a healthy work environment.

After 5 years of studying I have proven to be a good student, but what I need is to become a good scientist. To achieve the independence I am seeking I am currently doing a PhD at the University of Cambridge, MRC-MBU. I am studying how mitochondrial DNA mutations effect biological systems at single cell resolution. My aim is to become the autonomous and confident researcher I have alwayse wanted to be.