Francesca Demichelis

F Demichelis received her PhD in February 2005 from the International PhD School on Information and Communication Technology in Trento (Italy) where she developed systematic approaches to processing and understanding data generated through Tissue Microarray Technology (modelling heterogeneity/uncertainty in classification approaches relevant to biological entities such as intra-tumor protein expression). Between 2005-2007 she worked at the Brigham and Women's Hospital (Harvard Medical School), as computational biology Post-doc fellow. In joint projects with members of research groups at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, she developed analytical approaches for the analysis of cancer genomics datasets related to prostate cancer disease progression as part of a multi-institutional effort. Between 2008-20011, she worked at Weill Cornell Medical College as Assistant Professor in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and at the Institute for Computational Biomedicine. Her group focused on the study of structural variants (copy number variations - CNVs) as risk factors for cancer development and as potential facilitators (“triggers”) for specific somatic alterations (funded by DOD Young Investigator Award). From 2008 to 2010, she served as co-chair of the analysis team for Copy Number Variations in genome-wide association studies MicroArray Quality Control (MAQC) Project II, managed by FDA and was leader of the bioinformatics effort for the prostate cancer research group at Weill Cornell Medical College. In 2011 she joined the Centre for Integrative Biology at the University of Trento, Italy, where she is group leader of the Computational Oncology laboratory. Adjunct position at the Institute for Computational Biomedicine and Standing Member of the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, NY. In 2015, she was awarded a 5-year ERC Consolidator grant on Synthetic Lethality.