Background

I grew up in northern Italy, at the foot of the Alps. My parents, who are now couch potatoes, used to be very outdoorsy and took me hiking in the mountains every summer. I think that is when I started to love nature and became really interested in all biology- and ecology-related questions.

Past Professional Life

I fell in love with microbes during my master’s thesis, when I worked with magnetotactic bacteria. These are super cool bacteria with magnets inside them. From there, I switched to plants and studied the microbiome of wheat during my PhD, which I did in Germany at the University of Potsdam.

I then moved to soil for my first postdoc in the Barberán lab, where I studied the spatial distribution of microbes in arid soils of the Sonoran Desert and Arizona’s sky islands. There, I encountered another landscape that made me fall in love: the Sonoran Desert and the Madrean sky islands, with all the incredible life forms you can find there.

After that, I landed at the PANDA Core for Genomics and Microbiome Research at the University of Arizona, where I worked with microbiome data across all sorts of projects, mainly related to health.

Current Projects

But the seven-year-old Gabri who loved hiking up and down mountains told me that I needed to go back to the field. So the natural next step was: why not study the microbiome of wild animals? Now I study bacterial and fungal communities in wild small mammals, trying to understand how this symbiosis between microbes and animals works.

Skills

A lot of the practical work happens in bioinformatics. My code is a bit chaotic, but it gets the job done. I am known to have a bad temper when code does not work and to scream in Italian at the computer. Occasionally, if I really need to, I can still go to the wet lab too... Oh, and I am also learning a little bit of basic mammalogy and loving every minute of it, except for the dissections!

What else do I like to do?

Given that 95% of my days are at the computer, in my freetime I like to be active and go out. So i like hikes, bikerides, camping and sports in general. If I am really forced to stay inside, I like to play the guitar, cooking, drawing and reading.