I was an endlessly curious child who wanted to become a scientist. But it was my own experience as a teenager in a Pediatric Hospital Unit that shaped my scientific passion, where I became friends with children affected by leukemia. I was shocked by the terrible implications of this disease and became determined to design new therapies to fight it.
Inspired by this experience, I studied cancer biology at top institutions across Europe and the US. I wanted to understand how leukemia originated, and how it evolved to become an aggressive and hard-to-treat disease.
As a PhD student at the University of Oxford, I developed new sequencing technologies to understand how leukemia arises and evolves inside each individual cell. My deep passion for leukemia research later brought me to Dana Farber Cancer Institute, where I am currently studying the earliest molecular changes that predispose to leukemia, aiming to prevent leukemia from developing in the first place.