I grew up in Bernalda, a small village in the South of Italy, with my parents and two brothers. I attended the School of Medicine at the University of Siena, where I graduated magna cum laude in 2009. Afterward, I entered the residency program in Pediatrics at the University of Siena, where I graduated cum laude in 2015. I am currently working as a fellow of neonatal neurology at the Wilhelmina Children Hospital in Utrecht. I was awarded with the ESPR early investigator exchange program award and I am involved in setting up a study evaluating the relationship between brain function and structure in preterm infants.
During my medical training, I decided to perform two clinical internship in Pediatrics, one in Mexico and one in Brazil. These wonderful and intense experiences lit up my enthusiasm and passion for Pediatrics. I realized that every sick child in the world deserves the best possible care and I wanted to do my utmost to live up to that ideal. In the first years of my residency training, I discovered my interest for research and I started working on a project about oxidative stress biormarkers and their relation to brain injury in preterm infants, under the influence of Professor Giuseppe Buonocore. Owing to this project, I had the opportunity to move to The Netherlands, at the Department of Neonatology of the Wilhelmina Children Hospital, for a research fellowship, under the supervision of Professor Manon Benders and Professor Linda deVries. In The Netherlands, I had the chance to start a PhD project about early biomarkers of brain development and to improve my knowledge on neonatal neurology. I am grateful to all the preterm infants I met in the last years, the infinite strength I perceived in such small human beings, taught me to never give up.
