Position: Principal investigator

About Me: Alessandra graduated with honors in Physics at the University of Pisa, Italy, and obtained her Ph.D. in Structural and Functional Genomics at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), in the beautiful city of Trieste. During her Ph.D., while working on a project on alpha-synuclein and Parkinson's disease, she developed a long-lasting passion for the study of neurodegenerative disorders. She moved to the U.S. in 2008 to do a postdoc with Aaron Gitler at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford, leveraging the yeast genetic model to characterize a novel Parkinson's gene, PARK9, and using next-generation sequencing of trio families to discover causal genes for ALS. She then moved back to Philly to work as a bioinformatic scientist in the Center of Spatial and Functional Genomics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia with Struan Grant, where she developed novel chromatin conformation capture techniques to link GWAS loci to their functional target genes. Alessandra joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania as an Assistant Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in July 2020. Her lab focuses on solving the genetics of neurodegenerative disorders using cutting-edge genomic and epigenetic techniques, together with her colleagues at the Penn Neurodegeneration Genomics Center. Alessandra enjoys spending her free time with her kids, gardening, and playing with her dog Teddy and her cats Chavanel and Dulcinea.

Contact: [email protected]