Role
Full Professor of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at King's College London.
Bio
A graduate in Chemistry from the University of Naples Federico II, she has developed an international career of excellence, working in the United States (University of Wisconsin), in Switzerland with Nobel Prize winner Richard Ernst at ETH Zurich, in Oxford, and at EMBL in Heidelberg, where she was head of the Structures Program, as well as at the National Institute for Medical Research in London. She is a full professor at King's College London and an elected member of EMBO and the Academia Europaea.
For over thirty years, he has focused his research on the relationship between the structure and function of peptides and proteins, using integrated approaches from bioinformatics and structural biology. His studies analyze neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Friedreich's ataxia, focusing on the mechanisms of protein aggregation and liquid-liquid phase separation ( LLPS ) processes.
She has extended her research to the study of the properties of RNA-binding domains and the characterization of coronavirus proteins . During the pandemic, she provided important contributions to deciphering the structure of the coronavirus and the molecular response to Covid-19 , within the general context of the study of coronavirus infection. Author of approximately 300 international scientific publications, she is considered one of the world's leading experts in the biophysics of molecular machines.