Francesca holds a PhD in Veterinary and Animal Sciences and an MSc in Veterinary Biotechnological Sciences. Her passion for genetics began during a BSc internship at the University of Milan, where she was first introduced to research in this field.

Her PhD research was fully dedicated to feline genomics, focusing on the genetic causes of feline amyloidosis—a rare inherited disease that also affects humans, making the cat an elective comparative model. She applied a multiomics approach and spent several months at the Feline Genetics Laboratory at the University of Missouri (USA), where she gained hands-on experience in Whole Genome Sequencing, Variant Calling, Genotyping, and Genome-Wide Association Studies. She conducted the first-ever Copy Number Variant (CNV) detection in Felis catus for breed and disease characterization.

After completing her PhD, she moved to human biomedical research through a postdoctoral fellowship in bioinformatics at the Department of Pharmacological and Biomolecular Sciences, University of Milan. During this period, she expanded her expertise to include transcriptomics and CRISPR-Cas9 screening, contributing to cancer and metabolism research.

Now she is a computational biologist at the Center for Omics Sciences, IRCCS San Raffaele - Milano (Italy), where she specializes in data analysis and pipeline development for Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS). Her core skills include transcriptomics, genomics, epigenomics and methylation analyses.