My academic and professional background has been driven by a strong interest in understanding how pathogens evade host defenses and how the host responds to control infection—an area that became critically important during the COVID-19 pandemic for the development of effective therapeutic and management strategies. My professional journey has been shaped by international collaborations across academia, clinical institutions, and industry, therefore, I strongly believe in the value of cross-disciplinary teamwork to advance scientific research.

In particular, after graduating with honors in Medical Biotechnology in Italy, with a focus on Molecular Virology, I earned my PhD as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow within the VacTrain program (“Training Network for the Next Generation Vaccinologists”) at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), The Netherlands. My doctoral research focused on congenital Cytomegalovirus (cCMV) infection and correlates of protection for vaccine development.

Currently, I am engaged in several projects investigating the immunopathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 and HIV infections in the research group led by Professor Giulia Marchetti at the Clinic of Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine, University of Milan. These efforts have resulted in multiple first-author publications in peer-reviewed journals and presentations at national and international conferences. Notably, I received the Best Abstract in Clinical SARS-CoV-2 Research award from the Italian Society of Infectious and Tropical Diseases (SIMIT) during the 16th Italian Conference on AIDS and Antiviral Research (ICAR).