CV
Education
- 2022-Now: Postdoc in Biophysics, at University of California, Berkeley, and Univeristy of Leipzig. The objective of my research is to characterize how the evolution of bacteria and viruses leads to immune evasion. I develop unsupervised learning methods to describe the evolutionary trajectories of evolving pathogens and predict the spread of these pathogens in a structured population.
- Head of laboratory: Oskar Hallatsheck
- 2018–2021: PhD in Machine learning of immune repertoire interactions, jointly between Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Goettingen, and École Normale Superiéure, Paris. T and B cells rely on the diversity of their receptor sequences for antigen recognition. Biophysical models for the recombination of receptor chains have shown to well capture the statistics of the repertoire before selection. However, this diversity is subsequently reduced by thymic selection, which is not yet well characterized. In my PhD research project I applied a maximum likelihood approach to density ratio estimation to infer selection factors using deep neural network models and found that these non linear selection models accurately describe the distribution of immune receptors. I studied the differentiation pathways of T cells during thymic development and showed that T cell subtypes have significantly different repertoires both at the global and local level.
- Supervisors: Armita Nourmohammad, Thierry Mora, Aleksandra Walczak
- 2016–2018: Master in High Energy Physics, Jointly between ETH Zurich and École Polytechnique Paris.
- Internship at École Normale Supérieure, Paris, March-July 2018: Modeling the spiking activity of Ganglion cells in the retina with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks.
- Internship at CERN: Inference of Gradient Boosted Decision Trees with Quantile Error function to multivariate distributions of photon shower shape variables. I applied the technique to calibrate MC simulations of the interaction of Photons with the CMS Detector at CERN.
- 2013–2016: Bachelor in Physics, Università di Trento, Italy. Result: 110/110 e Lode (with honors)
- Honor program in physics of the bachelor degree.
- Elected as a student representative in the Council of the Department of Physics.
- One-year Erasmus, UiO, Oslo, Norway.
- Internship at CERN: Collaboration with the ATLAS@Home project at CERN for a semester in order to develop a graphical user interface for the project.
- 2008–2013: Highschool Diploma, Liceo Scientifico G. Fracastoro, Verona, Italy.
- Elected as a Student representative in “Consulta Provinciale degli studenti”.
- Exchange semester in Phitsanulok Pittayakom School,Thailand.
Awards
- Humboldt Research Fellowship, Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, 2022
- Travel Award for conference Sensing Chemical Spaces in Princeton University, USA 2019
- Honor program in Physics, University of Trento 2016
- Merit Award, University of Trento 2016
Talks, Conferences, Workshops and Summer Schools
- American Physical Society March Meeting, Online 2021
- Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle USA 2019
- Paris Biological Physics Community Day, France 2019
- Workshop on New Developments in Computational Physics, Leipzig University, 2022
- Symposium Physics of Cancer, Leipzig University, 2022
- Symposium Active Assemblies, Leipzig University, 2022
- Bay Area Population Genomics Conference XIX, Stanford University, USA 2022
- Workshop Sensing and Signaling in Immune Systems: Mathematics meets Biology, Banff International Research Station, CA 2022
- Soft Matter Day, Peter Debye Institute for Soft Matter Physics, Leipzig Germany 2022
- Probabilistic Modelling in Genomics Conference, Oxford University, UK 2022
- Basel Computational Biology Conference, SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, CH, 2021
- Workshop Quantitative evolution, phylogeny and ecology: from models to data and back, Sorbonne University, Paris France 2021
- Workshop Sensing Chemical Spaces, Princeton University, USA 2019
- Workshop Adaptation, Institute for the Theoretical Sciences and The Graduate Center, CUNY, USA 2019
- Tumors and Immune Systems: From Theory to Therapy, Institut d’Etudes Scientifiques de Cargèse, France 2019
- Beg Rohu Summer School on Statistical Mechanics and Emergent Phenomena in Biology, ENVSN and ENS Paris, France 2021
- Boulder Summer School for Condensed Matter: Theoretical Biophysics, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA 2019
- 3rd Winter School of Multiscale Integration in Biological Systems, Institut Curie, France 2018
