Roberto Feuda

I was born in Terracina, a beautiful seaside town between Rome and Naples, but science soon took me far beyond its shores. After completing my BSc and MSc at the University of Rome La Sapienza, I moved to Ireland, where I completed my PhD in 2013 at Maynooth University with Prof. Davide Pisani. My doctoral research focused on the origins of opsins and the evolutionary relationships among non-bilaterian animal lineages.

I then joined Prof. Peter Holland’s lab at the University of Oxford for a short postdoctoral position studying insect opsins, before moving 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 establish my own research group.

In October 2025, I joined the University of Bologna as an Associate Professor, and in December 2025 I was awarded a FIS Advanced Grant to investigate how gene regulatory networks and neuronal cell types evolved. My research integrates evolutionary genomics, developmental biology, and single-cell transcriptomics to investigate how cell types originate, diversify, and evolve.