I am a physicist by training who progressively drifted toward life sciences. I obtained a bachelor’s
degree in physics (cum laude) in 2013 at Università degli Studi di Torino (Italy), and a joint
master’s degree in physics of complex systems (cum laude) in 2015 at Politecnico di Torino (Italy)
and Université Paris-Sud (France), for which I was awarded a 1-year fully-funded fellowship as
Paris-Saclay International Master’s Scholar at Université Paris-Sud. During my master, I became
fascinated with the application of physics-driven formalisms to predict cell behaviour. Driven by
this curiosity, I joined José Onuchic, a theoretician working on gene regulation in Rice
University’s department of Chemistry, earning a PhD in 2019. During my PhD, I developed
mathematical models to explain how the intricate interactions between genes, non-coding RNAs
and transcription factors in cancer cells induce epithelial-mesenchymal transition – a
well-known driver of metastasis. My PhD research was acknowledged by the 2017 Hoffman fellowship
“in recognition of outstanding early achievement toward the Ph.D. degree” and the 2018 Marjory
Meyer Hasselman fellowship “in recognition of academic excellence in Chemistry”, which provided
independent funding for my PhD scholarship for one year. In 2020, I moved to University of
California Irvine (UC Irvine) as an NSF-Simons postdoctoral fellow with Qing Nie, a mathematician
with expertise in single cell sequencing-driven computational modelling. In my postdoc, I
explored the integration between mathematical modelling and single cell Omics data, developing
several data-driven computational methods that investigate gene regulation, single cell trajectory
reconstruction, and cell-to-cell communication. In June 2024, I established my independent research
group at the Radboud Institute for Molecular Life Science (RIMLS) in Radboud University, Nijmegen,
to develop the next generation of integrative computational methods to uncover the molecular
mechanisms underlying cell behaviour in development and disease.
Besides research and teaching, I have multiple administrative roles in Radboud university. I am a member of Radboud’s faculty of science library committee that oversees publication and open science policies, and I am a member of the Radboud Young academy.