Profile

Hello! My name is Irma and I am a PhD student at EMBL Heidelberg in the Barabas lab. I grew up in a small town in the south of Italy, Lucera, famous for its wonderful castle and I studied Biotechnology in Bologna at the oldest University in Europe. For my Master thesis project, I joined EMBL and therefore I moved to Heidelberg, which reminds me both of my hometown and of my University city.

Working in the Barabas lab, I became fascinated by transposons, DNA parasites that have traversed the whole tree of life by jumping within and between their host genomes. My PhD project focuses on Sleeping Beauty, a transposon that last moved in the fish genomes more than 10 million years ago and has been awakened from its long sleep by scientists. During my PhD, I investigated the second life of Sleeping Beauty: I analyzed how it jumps in the genomes after its resurrection and I developed a method to make it cut and paste DNA on demand in a tightly controlled way. This method is now being applied to genetically modify human cells so that they could recognize and attack cancer.

My PhD project perfectly exemplifies what I like most about science: every discovery opens up new avenues to explore, attracting scientists to even different research fields. Thus, the exchange of findings and thoughts is the basis of research development. I am looking forward to talking about science with high school students: they have always the most creative and exciting ideas to share!