Dr. Dafne Campigli Di Giammartino

During most of my professional life, I worked in New York, where I developed a fascination with understanding how cells operate at the molecular level and the mechanisms that sustain cell identity, pluripotency and tumor biology. Across my career, I have been driven by a deep curiosity to understand the molecular mechanisms that govern gene expression, with the aim of revealing the fundamental rules that control this process in both physiological and pathological contexts. Only by advancing our knowledge of these basic biological principles can we manipulate underlying conditions to correct diseases and enable therapeutic interventions.

My background combines molecular biology, biochemistry and genomics. I pursued my PhD at Columbia University where I contributed to understanding the crosstalk between pre-mRNA processing and other nuclear pathways (e.g. cancer, DNA damage etc). My postdoctoral research at Weill Cornell Medicine was supported by a NYSCF fellowship and mostly focused on epigenetics and chromatin conformation, employing advanced sequencing and CRISPR technologies. Then, as a research associate at Cornell I expanded this line of research to patient-derived glioma stem cells building an atlas of 3D promoter-enhancer contacts in order to identify and target tumor-specific 3D enhancer hubs. After almost two decades abroad, I recently returned to Italy, where I established my laboratory at the Italian Institute of Technology, supported by the ECF grant from Human Technopole and the FIS2 grant from the Italian Ministry of Education.