I am a Ph.D. student at the Biocomplexity Group of the Niels Bohr Institute and my research is mostly focused on the dynamical properties of biological systems, from neuronal networks to transcription factors regulation in the cell. The main goal of my group is to build simple theoretical models that can help us extract the main features of the system in question, which we then use not only to explain current experimental data, but also to make predictions and drive new theories.

In particular, during my Ph.D. I’ve been studying the emergence of collective behaviors, such as synchronization, in groups of interacting neurons in the brain. I then moved to study the dynamics of the transcription factor p53, whose role in cancer prevention is so essential to be known as “guardian of the genome”. In this context, we discovered how oscillations in p53 nuclear abundance can optimize the process of DNA damage repair.

I have always been really fascinated by the beauty and power of math to describe seemingly completely different systems under the same unifying theory, this is why I find the field of nonlinear dynamical systems so exciting.