Alberto Auricchio was born in Naples, August 14, 1969.
Alberto Auricchio, MD is Professor of Medical Genetics at the Department of Advanced Biomedical Sciences, “Federico II” University in Naples, and Scientific Director of Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine (TIGEM) in Pozzuoli (NA), Italy. Scientific Director of AAVantgarde Bio s.r.l., President of European Society of Gene and Cell Terapy (ESGCT).
Alberto Auricchio is a leading researcher in the field of gene therapy, with more than 20 years of experience and over 150 publications in high-impact journals. He has made significant contributions to the therapy of several genetic disorders, in particular retinal degenerations and inborn errors of metabolism. He pioneered the use of adeno-associated viral vectors for gene delivery to various tissues, including the retina, and the liver. His work has resulted in three clinical trials (including one drug already in commercialization) and seven granted patents. He founded AAVantgarde bio stemming from his research and contributed to the successful completion of a record 61 million euro Series A fundraising. His work has also been recognized as an awardee of three European Research Council (ERC) research grants and one proof of concept ERC as well as several international awards. Alberto Auricchio is a valuable member of the scientific community and will serve as president of the European Society of Gene and Cell Therapy in 2024-2026 and a role model for young researchers. He deserves to become a member of EMBO for his outstanding achievements and his commitment to advancing the field of gene therapy.
Alberto Auricchio is a valuable member of the scientific community and a role model for young researchers.

Magda Bienko graduated in Biotechnology from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland in 2005. Afterwards, she joined the Dikic lab at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, where she obtained her PhD in Biochemistry in 2010. As a PhD student, she pioneered discoveries of non-proteolytic roles of ubiquitin in the regulation of DNA damage responses (Science 2005; Molecular Cell 2009). As a postdoc, supported by a Human Frontier Science Program Fellowship, she made a bold field transition by joining the van Oudenaarden Systems Biology Lab at MIT, USA, where she developed new methods for visualizing individual DNA and RNA molecules in single cells (HD-FISH, Nature Methods 2013). In 2015, she was appointed Assistant Professor at the Karolinska Institutet and Fellow of the Science for Life Laboratory in Stockholm, Sweden, where she started her own Lab for Quantitative Biology of the Nucleus. In the fall of 2022 she opened her lab at the Human Technopole in Milan, Italy. As a principal investigator and as an ERC Starting Grant and Consolidator Grant awardee, she contributed to developing a novel sequencing method for mapping DNA double-strand breaks along the genome (BLISS, Nature Communications 2017; Nature Protocols 2020), and pioneered the first genome-wide method for profiling radial distances in the nucleus (GPSeq, Nature Biotechnology 2020). She has also built open-access resources for high-resolution DNA and RNA fluorescence in situ hybridization (iFISH, Nature Communications 2019), which her group is routinely using to study genome organization and gene expression at single cell resolution. Her main research interest is in understanding the forces and mechanisms that determine how chromatin is spatially arranged in the nucleus and how disruption of the higher-order chromatin structure contributes to pathogenic processes.

Raffaele Calogero is a Full Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Turin. He is the head of the Bioinformatics and Genomics Core Lab (BGcore) at the Center for Molecular Biotechnology of the University of Turin. He is also a co-founder of the Reproducible Bioinformatics Project, a research initiative focused on developing reproducible bioinformatics workflows in genomics. Professor Calogero’s current research focuses on reproducibility in bioinformatics. He is a member of the management board of ELIXIR Italy, serves as the President of the Italian Society of Bioinformatics (BITS), and is a co-leader of the ELIXIR Single Cell Omics Community.

During her PhD at KU Leuven, Belgium (2004-2008), Kim De Keersmaecker worked on the role of oncogenic kinases in T-cell leukemia. From 2008 till 2010, she performed postdoctoral research at Columbia University (New York, USA), studying the role of transcription factor TLX1 in T-cell leukemia. During a second postdoc (KU Leuven, 2010-2013), she discovered somatic mutations in ribosomal proteins in cancer. In 2014, Kim received a prestigious ERC Starting Grant and established an independent research lab at KU Leuven studying the role of somatic ribosome defects in cancer. This successful project was followed by an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2020. The De Keersmaecker lab described highly novel modes of translational dysregulation in cancer, and the impact of her research is illustrated by publications in leading journals such as Nature Genetics, Nature Communications, Blood, Leukemia and Cancer Research, and by several scientific awards that she obtained for her work.

Michela Alessandra Denti is a Molecular Biologist with a keen interest in RNA as a key player in (human) diseases and as a tool of therapeutical intervention. She is Full Professor of Cellular and Experimental Biology at the University of Trento, where she teaches “RNA Biology and Biotechnology” Courses to BSc and PhD students and “Genomics Technologies” to MSc students.
She received a PhD in Molecular Biology from the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa) in 1997. During her doctoral and post-doctoral studies, she has worked in National and International research centers, including the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, FORTH, Heraklion, Crete, (Greece) and the Sapienza University of Rome.
She believes that progresses in Science are due to a combination of lucky serendipitous discoveries and technological advances, and has been always actively seeking a balance between fundamental and applied research. Since 2008 she is Group Leader of the Laboratory of RNA Biology and Biotechnology at the Department of Cellular, Computational and Integrative Biology – CIBIO. The group has two main research interests: MODULATION OF RNA splicing as a cure for inherited diseases and MICRORNAs as key players and biomarkers in cancer, cardiac and neurodegenerative diseases.

Jamie Hackett is a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), within the Epigenetics and Neurobiology unit in Rome, Italy. He obtained his PhD at the University of Edinburgh, and completed postdoctoral training at the University of Cambridge, UK, under Prof. Azim Surani. The Hackett laboratory investigates (epi)genetic mechanisms that underpin early development and phenotypic traits, with through two overarching scientific themes. (i) To understand the regulatory impact of chromatin changes in health and disease, by engineering precision epigenome editing tools for (pre-)clinical applications. (ii) To investigate the potential for altered epigenetic states to be transmitted through mitosis or meiosis and influence disease risk. Hackett was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2022.

Ivano Legnini is a molecular and systems biologist interested in gene regulation.
He graduated in Genetics and Molecular Biology at Sapienza University of Rome in 2012. He worked on non-coding RNA and post-transcriptional gene regulation in the lab of Irene Bozzoni, where he completed his PhD in 2016. He then won an EMBO fellowship and joined the lab of Nikolaus Rajewsky at the Max Delbrück Center – Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology, where he established different lines of research, for example developing FLAM-seq for studying poly(A) tail regulation, and combining optogenetics with spatial transcriptomics to study spatial regulation of gene expression in organoid models of neurodevelopment. He moved to Milan and started his lab at HT in March 2023, working in the fields of gene regulation and RNA metabolism, as well as on developing new genomic technologies for perturbing and profiling gene expression.

Anders H. Lund graduated from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, in 1996. He trained as a postdoc at the University of Aarhus (1996-1999) and the Netherlands Cancer Institute (1999-2004) where he worked on the identification of novel oncogenes. He was appointed associate professor at the Biotech Research and Innovation Centre (BRIC), University of Copenhagen in 2004, became full professor in 2009, and was appointed Director of BRIC in 2019.
With a focus on RNA modifications, translation and specialized ribosomes, the aim of the laboratory is to unveil fundamental biological mechanisms and understand how these become perturbed during diseases.

The main task for many proteins inside living cells is to catalyze chemical reactions. Proteins having such a catalytic function are called enzymes. The structural biology group headed by Dr. Andrea Mattevi in the Dept. of Biology and Biotechnology structural basis of enzyme catalysis and the dynamic properties of proteins. A common theme for the research projects in the laboratory (www.unipv.it/biocry) is the investigation of medically relevant enzymes with interesting chemical properties, such as complex multifunctional systems and proteins performing unusual catalytic functions. The core of the research activity is represented by X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy that is employed to study protein three-dimensional structures. This is complemented by other approaches such as site-directed mutagenesis, analysis of enzyme kinetics, and computational chemistry.

Mario Nicodemi is Full Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Naples Federico II and Einstein Visiting Professor at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin. For his scientific discoveries at the frontier between physics and biology he was awarded in 2016 the Einstein BIH Fellowship by the Einstein Foundation, and in 2022 the Occhialini Medal and Prize by the UK Institute of Physics and the Italian Physical Society. He had previously held a professorship at the UK Complexity Science Centre at the University of Warwick, and worked at Imperial College London and at the École Supérieure ESPCI in Paris. He coordinates the Theoretical Physics group at the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Naples and the INFN National Project (IS) on Biological Physics. At Federico II, he leads the University’s Task Force on Computational Biology. He is also a member of numerous international scientific consortia and institutions, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the USA, the Berlin Institute of Health in Germany, and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche in France.

Argyris Papantonis studied Biology at the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, where he also undertook his PhD work under the supervision of Prof. Rena Lecanidou. In 2008 he moved to Oxford for his postdoctoral work with Prof. Peter Cook at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology. In 2013 he was appointed as a Junior Research Group Leader for Chromatin Systems Biology at the Center for Molecular Medicine Cologne, and in 2018 he was recruited to the Medical Faculty of the Georg-August University of Göttingen where he currently is a Professor for Translational Epigenetics & Genome Architecture.

Prof. Davide Cacchiarelli is a distinguished genomics expert with a robust background in both academia and industry. He earned his Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Genetics and Molecular Biology from the University of Rome "La Sapienza," where he focused on RNA regulation mechanisms. In 2011, he advanced his research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, as well as Harvard University's Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, concentrating on cellular reprogramming and fate transitions using genomic methodologies.
Upon returning to Italy in 2017, Dr. Cacchiarelli established the Laboratory of Integrative Genomics at the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine (TIGEM). His interdisciplinary research integrates pluripotency and stem cell biology with cellular engineering, molecular diagnostics, genomic approaches, and mathematical modeling. His work aims to elucidate the dynamics of cell fate decisions during differentiation, conversion, and reprogramming, particularly in the context of genetic mutations affecting key regulatory proteins.
In addition to his role at TIGEM, Dr. Cacchiarelli serves as a "Rita-Levi Montalcini" Associate Professor of Molecular Biology at the Department of Translational Medicine, University of Naples "Federico II." He is also the Principal Investigator of the Armenise-Harvard Laboratory of Integrative Genomics. His contributions to descriptive, functional, and clinical genomics, as well as epigenomics and miRNA function, have been widely recognized. Notably, in 2024, he was honored with the "Alfredo Margreth" award by the Accademia dei Lincei for his significant research in muscle pathophysiology, focusing on the regulation of muscle differentiation and reprogramming in both physiological conditions and Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

Sheref carried-out his undergraduate and graduate studies on metalloproteins at Ohio State University under the guidance of Prof. J. A. Cowan. He then investigated the prebiotic chemistry accessible to protocellular structures with Prof. Jack Szostak at Harvard/MGH. He used a career development award from the Armenise-Harvard Foundation to begin his independent career at the University of Trento as an assistant and then associate professor. Sheref subsequently moved to the University of Alberta as a professor of chemistry. In the middle of 2024, Sheref returned to the University of Trento as a professor of biochemistry. His research focuses on the prebiotic chemistry of metallopeptides and the dynamics of protocells.