Plenary Speaker

Serena Zacchigna obtained her MD in 2000 and her PhD in Molecular Genetics in 2005, from the International School of Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy. In 2006 she was awarded a Marie-Curie post-doctoral research fellow at VIB in Leuven (Belgium) to work on the neurovascular link.

In 2009 she returned to Trieste, where she established her own group in 2015 at the ICGEB, where she acts as the scientific coordinator the ICGEB programs. Since 2019 she has joined the University of Trieste as Associate Professor.

Her interests focus on the crosstalk between multiple cell types in the heart, with the ultimate goal of promoting effective neo-vascularization and cardiac regeneration following heart ischemia. More recently, she has started investigating the reasons for the low incidence of cardiac cancer.

She has published over 150 papers (h-index 52; source: SCOPUS).