Vittoria Poli

Dr Vittoria Poli earned her PhD in Translational and Molecular Medicine at the University of Milano-Bicocca in 2016, under the supervision of Prof. Alessio Zippo. During her PhD, she studied mammary epithelial stem cells (SCs) self-renewal and dynamic of cell division, acquiring expertise in time-lapse microscopy. This allowed her to contribute to a project on the role of MYC in the establishment of a regulatory circuit that sustains ESCs self-renewal (Fagnocchi et al., Nat Commun. 2016). In the later years, she focused on cancer biology, gaining experience in chromatin biology analysis. She successfully concluded her PhD project with a first-author publication, in which she demonstrated the role of MYC in sustaining an epigenetic reprogramming process toward a SC-like condition, which favours cell transformation (Poli et al., Nat Commun. 2018). In 2018, she got a 3-year AIRC fellowship (#21158) as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Trento, in the Chromatin Biology and Epigenetics laboratory headed by Prof. Alessio Zippo. Here she worked on the investigation of the chromatin players synergizing with MYC in tumorigenesis and metastatic seeding, deepening her expertise on chromatin dynamics. In parallel to this, she developed mammary organoid models that she exploited as a drug-screening platform and she contributed as a co-first author to a project based on Kabuki Syndrome and the essential role of the chromatin player MLL4 for a functional portioning of the chromatin (Fasciani et al., Nature Genetics 2020). In January 2021, she joined the laboratory of Prof. Stefano Campaner, at the Italian Institute of Technology in Milan, where she is working as a post-doc on the functional evaluation of novel regulators of TAZ oncogene in breast cancer.