Alba Grifoni

Throughout her career, Angela Grifoni’s main interest has been to study the immune response to viral infections and how it is shaped by HLA-molecules. A native of Rome, Italy, she has earned her PhD in Immunology from the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” in 2014 in the laboratory of Vittorio Colizzi. During the second half of her PhD and the following two years, she worked at Proxagen Ltd. (Sofia, Bulgaria) with Massimo Amicosante applying immune informatics approaches to predict T and B cell epitopes in the context of several viral infections such as HIV, ZIKV, Ebola and HBV. That naturally brought her to the Sette laboratory at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology as a postdoc in 2016, where she is now instructor/research faculty since 2020. In the viral team she works closely with Daniela Weiskopf and Alessandro Sette, combining experimental approaches and computational predictions to investigate T cell responses against several viral infections such as DENV, ZIKV, VZV and CHIKV and most recently against SARS-CoV-2. Her recent efforts in the COVID-19 field sheds new light on the T cell reactivity against SARS-CoV-2 leading to several already highly cited publications in journals such as Cell and Science. Her Cell paper published in June 2020 had one of the highest social media impacts in the history of the journal (altmeric score of over 8800) and has been the point of discussion in a congressional hearing in Washington D.C. being described by the director of the NIAID, Dr. Fauci, as “work we really need to pursue”. Overall, Dr. Grifoni has co-authored 50 peer-reviewed publications during her scientific career, 22 of those as first or last author with more than 1536 citations, an h-index of 15 and i-10-index of 27.