As a Medical Doctor and specialist in Internal Medicine, I started my scientific career in a clinical environment mainly focused on viral hepatitis research.
After a postdoc at UCSD in Michael Karin’s lab working on NF-kB regulation, I started my research activity as independent investigator at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (Switzerland) in 2000 and moved to the IEO (European Institute of Oncology) in Milan in 2005.
From the beginning of my activity as an independent investigator I re-focused my attention and main research topic from signaling to the mechanisms linking chromatin organization to the control of inflammatory gene expression in macrophages, which has remained the main research topic in my lab. More recently, a second research line has been activated focusing on the transcriptional control of altered cell differentiation in pancreatic cancer.