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I was born in Terracina, a beautiful seaside town between Rome and Naples, but science took me far beyond its shores. After my BSc and MSc at the University of Rome La Sapienza, I completed a PhD at the University of Ireland, Maynooth, in 2013 with Prof. Davide Pisani, studying the origins of opsins and the relatioships between non-bilaterian animal lineages. I then joined Prof. Peter Holland’s lab at Oxford for a short postdoc on insect opsins, followed by a move to Caltech to work with Prof. Eric Davidson on the evolution of gene regulatory networks. In 2018, I was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and returned to Europe to start my lab. In October 2025, I will join the University of Bologna as Associate Professor. My research integrates evolutionary genomics, developmental biology, and single-cell transcriptomics to study the evolution of cell types.
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