Biography

Marzia Parisi graduated in 2015 from Sapienza University of Rome, with a PhD in Aeronautical and Space Technology in the field of Radio Science. At the Radio Science Laboratory, led by Prof. Luciano Iess, she was introduced to the field of Orbit Determination and Gravity Science, a remote sensing technique for the study of planetary and satellite interiors by means of precise Doppler tracking of interplanetary spacecraft. Subtle variations in radio carrier frequencies bear information about equally subtle perturbations of the probe velocity, which are sensitive to the gravity field of the body and its interior structure and dynamics. Dr. Parisi started her career by carrying out precise numerical simulations of ESA’s JUICE radiometric measurements, which will launch in 2022. The objective of the onboard gravity experiment is the detection of subsurface oceans on Jupiter’s Galilean moons, with particular focus on Ganymede, the largest satellite in the Solar System. In her PhD thesis, Dr. Parisi successfully proved the possibility of detecting hidden liquid water reservoir on Ganymede, by means of precise tidal measurements. In addition, she developed techniques for the precise reconstruction of the spacecraft trajectory (multi-arc and batch sequential filters), in the challenging Jovian environment. Her work on the search for liquid water in the Solar System continued with the analysis of NASA’s Cassini mission gravity data, collected at the numerous and variegated icy moons of Saturn (e.g. Enceladus, Rhea, Titan).

For Enceladus, Dr. Parisi was responsible for the data analysis that led to the discovery of a regional water ocean at its south pole. This discovery fueled renewed interest in the small icy moon, which quickly became one of the targets for future astrobiology missions. In late 2014, Dr. Parisi accepted a Postdoctoral Fellow position at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where she was awarded the Dean’s Fellowship. Here, she established her first connection with NASA’s Juno mission at Jupiter, which continues to this day. She explored the multiple and diverse interconnections between radiometric measurements of gravitational fields, and atmospheric dynamics of gas giants. She developed the concept of determining the depth of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot with multiple Juno overflights, measurements that were completed in 2019. In parallel, she was introduced to the discipline of radio occultations, with applications to the Jovian system, both for the neutral atmosphere and the electrically charged regions of Jupiter and its moons. In 2016 Dr. Parisi joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Caltech), as a Postdoctoral Fellow first, and as a Research Scientist a year later in the Planetary Radar and Radio Sciences group. Ever since, she has been working on the Juno gravity science experiment and became an integral part of its science team. Among her accomplishments (shared with the Juno team), we find the first detection ever of a hemispherically asymmetric gravity field of a gas giant (Jupiter), related to the depth of the visible powerful zonal jets. Since 2017, she is also a member of the Juno Gravity Science operation team, responsible for the acquisition, processing and analysis of the radiometric data. For her work on the Juno mission, Dr. Parisi was awarded the individual JPL’s Charles Elachi Award for Outstanding Early Career Achievement (2018) and NASA’s Early Career Achievement Medal (2019), in addition to several group awards

Biography

Marco Bernardi is assistant professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at Caltech. Prior to moving to the U.S.for graduate school, Marco obtained his BS from University of Rome La Sapienza  and  MS from  University  of  Rome  Tor  Vergata, and spent  a  yearin  Australia as  an Endeavour Fellow carrying  out  research toward  his  MS  thesis. Marco received  his  Ph.D.  in Materials Science from MIT, where he worked with Prof. Jeff Grossman on novel materials and physical processes for solar energy conversion. He was a postdoc in the Physics Department at UC Berkeley, where, workingwith Profs. Steve Louie and Jeff Neaton, he developed new theoretical approaches for investigating excited electrons in materials. Marco’s group at Caltech develops quantum mechanical calculations aimed at understanding the dynamics  of  electrons  in  materials,  with  applications  to  electronics,  optoelectronics,  energy, quantum technologies and ultrafast science. Marco has given seminal contributions in this field, for which he received the 2015 Psi-K Volker Heine Young Investigator Award, awarded every five years to recognize an individual for outstanding work in electronic structure calculations, as well as the AFOSR Young Investigator Award in 2017 and the NSF CAREER Award in 2018. His  work  favors  quantitative  analysis  and  accurate computational approaches  to understand the physics and potential applications of novel materials, charting new directions in materials theory.

Biography

Stefano Ermon is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the CS Department at Stanford University, where he is affiliated with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and a fellow of the Woods Institute for the Environment. His research is centered on techniques for probabilistic modeling of data and is motivated by applications in the emerging field of computational sustainability. He has won several awards, including four Best Paper Awards (AAAI, UAI and CP), a NSF Career Award, ONR and AFOSR Young Investigator Awards, a Sony Faculty Innovation Award, a Hellman Faculty Fellowship, Microsoft Research Fellowship, Sloan Fellowship, and the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award. Stefano earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University in 2015.

Biography

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.

Biography

I am a physician-scientist focusing on the biology and therapeutic targeting of B-cell lymphoma. I am currently an Advanced Oncology Fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) entering the second and final year of sub-specialization in lymphoid malignancies. My clinical training and five years of postdoctoral research fellowship at MSKCC and Weill CornellMedical College have provided me with a unique set of skills and extensive expertise in B-cell lymphomas. The direct experience with patients has increased my curiosity to answer clinically relevant questions that are significant for improving the treatment of lymphoma. As a physician, I treat oncologic patients using standard and experimental therapies. As a scientist, I translate basic mechanisms into biomedically impactful findings. My fondness for both clinical and basic science has solidified my decision to pursue a career as a translational oncologist who is able to bring discoveries from the bench to the bedside.I trained in Medical Oncology at the University of Messina in Italy and was certified as an oncologist with the highest honors. Given my interest in the molecular mechanisms underlying cancer development, I decided to enroll in a PhD program in Cellular Biology and Experimental Medicine that I developed at MSKCC under the mentorship of Dr. Anas Younes, a leading translational researcher in the experimental lymphoma field. In Dr.Younes’ lab I have worked for three years on the development of novel targeted therapies aimed at disrupting well-defined oncogenic signaling pathways, including PI3K, BCL2 and NF-kB. My first work on CUDC-907, a dual PI3K and HDAC inhibitor (Mondello et al, Oncotarget 2017), helped provide data for FDA approval for the treatment of relapsed/refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). I had the opportunity to give an oral presentation based on this work at the 2016 ASH Annual meeting and earned the 2016 ASH Abstract Achievement Award. I also discovered that histone deacetylase inhibition could downregulate expression of a mutated form of MYD88, a signaling adaptor that is frequently mutated in patients with B-cell lymphoma. I showed that this effect was dependent on transcriptional regulation of MYD88 through STAT3 and could enhance ibrutinib efficacy in MYD88 mutant cells (Mondello et al, JCI Insight 2017). This and two subsequent works (Liu Y* and Mondello P*, PNAS 2018; Derenzini E, Mondello P, et al, Cell Reports 2018) provided the mechanistic rationale for the development of ongoing clinical trials at MSKCC (NCT03939182, NCT01742988).To further build on my interest in lymphoma epigenetics, I pursued postdoctoral studies at Weill Cornell Medical College in the laboratory of Dr. Ari Melnick, a world-renowned expert in transcription and epigenetics. The focus of my postdoctoral research was aberrant epigenetic programming and development of precision guided therapies in B-cell lymphoma. Specifically, I explored the role of selective HDAC3 inhibitors in restoring antigen presentation molecules in lymphoma cells, enabling T-cells to recognize and kill them, especially in the presence of CREBBP mutations. This work led to a first-author paper in Cancer Discovery, and set the stage for the clinical development of this small molecule. Iwas also awarded the NIH/NCI Hemsley scholarship following this publication.I then enhanced my research skills related to cancer immunotherapy while studying the role of tumor-immune interactions as a research fellow at Mayo Clinic in the laboratory andclinic of Dr. Stephen Ansell, relevant investigator of immunotherapy and immune surveillance. I discovered that the expression of intrafollicular memory CD4+ T-cells is an independent predictor of outcome in follicular lymphoma (FL) and established a new risk model, termed BioFLIPI, that incorporates biological and clinical features to improve risk stratification for these patients. This work was selected as oral presentation at the 2019 ASH Annual meeting and recognized with the 2019 ASH Abstract Achievement Award and the 2020 ASCO Merit Award.

More recently, I have returned to MSKCC for further clinical training as an Advanced Oncology Fellow under the mentorship of Dr. Andrew Zelenetz, an internationally recognized leader in the lymphoid malignancies. Having spent the last year treating patients with Dr. Younes and Dr. Zelenetz, I have quickly honed my expertise in the treatment of B-cell lymphomas. I designed a clinical trial investigating the combination of HDAC3 inhibitors and venetoclax (a BCL2 inhibitor) in patients with FL and DLBCL based on my own preclinical data. I have had the unique opportunity to spearhead a multicenter study comparing the efficacy of R-CHOP vs R-Bendamustine in FL patients with high SUV at the baseline PET. Additionally, I have been awarded the NIH/NCI MSK Lymphoma SPORE Career Enhancement Award and led a major research effort between the MSK and Mayo Clinic Lymphoma SPOREs. This project will characterize the genetic landscape and microenvironment of the largely unknown FL3B, and ultimately lead to novel rationally designed clinical trials for patients with this aggressive lymphoma subset, helping to address an unmet medical need. Moreover, I was recently awarded the NIH/NCI K30 Clinical Research Methodology Curriculum Award andhave pursued additional funding opportunities including the ASCO Young Investigator Award and the Lymphoma Scientific Research Mentoring Program by Lymphoma Research Foundation.My career goal is to become an independent investigator in a leading academicresearch institution in the US where I can run an independent laboratory and maintain clinical activities as a medical oncologist. My prior experience and current training will provide me with a solid foundation to reach my purpose of accelerating the translation of my scientific discoveries into novel treatment strategies to improve the cure rate of patients with B-cell lymphomas.