Role
Researcher at the Institute of Biophysics of the CNR in Milan
Bio
After graduating in Biology in 1987 in Milan, she worked for a series of postdoctoral fellowships in various laboratories in Italy (CNR, ICGEB in Trieste) and abroad (England, Department of Biochemistry at the University of Birmingham, and USA, Salk Institute , in Inder Verma's laboratory). After 15 years of experience in various laboratories, she obtained a research position at the Institute of Clinical Physiology (IFC) of the CNR in Pisa. After a short stint there, following a serious accident for which she was not responsible, she was forced to leave the laboratory. She then embarked on a new phase of her scientific career, dedicating herself to Biological Representation, with the idea of virtually recreating the cellular world using techniques developed in the field of Computer Graphics (film, video, and video games). Today, the discipline is recognized as "Molecular Graphics." In 2006, he founded the Scientific Visualization Unit at the IFC, obtaining initial funding to work on molecular imaging projects, detailed below in the Scientific Results section. In 2019, he moved to the Institute of Biophysics at the CNR in Milan. During this period, he established collaborative relationships with groups of Cuban computer scientists, bioinformaticians, and biologists, with whom he has active and funded projects, always related to visualization, in this case of the dengue virus.
Today Monica Zoppé is considered a pioneer of the Art and Science of Scientific Visualization , and recognized as one of the major theorists in the field, often invited to mostly international conferences and meetings.
The scientific results obtained in the field of experimental biology are documented in publications accessible online on the ORCID website.