Stefania Policicchio

I am an early career researcher with expertise in both wet-lab and computational methods. I have a strong background in human genomics and epigenomics as well as complex method development for wet lab applications (e.g. flow cytometry). After graduating in Neurobiology (MSc) at the University of Pavia, I moved to the UK where I completed my Ph.D. in Epigenomics and worked as post-doctoral researcher. My work focused on understanding the causes and consequences of molecular variation in the human brain, and its relevance to neuropsychiatric phenotypes. In particular, I explored how epigenomic variation influences gene regulation in the human brain, profiling DNA and histone modifications across specific brain regions and cell-types and relating these to neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases such as suicidal behaviour, schizophrenia and dementia. After 7 years abroad, I returned to Italy to join Dr. Di Giammartino’s lab at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) to investigate the role of ncRNAs and their epitranscriptional modifications in the organization of the 3D genome in stem cells and cancer stem cells by using cutting-edge chromatin conformation assays in combination with CRISPR-based genetic and epigenetic engineering tools.