Valentina Cappelletti

Valentina was born in Montevarchi, a little town near Florence, Italy. In 2012 Valentina got her Master's degree in Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Florence (Italy) carrying out a research thesis in Cavalieri's lab. There, her research activity was focused on the dissection of genetic and environmental factors regulating yeast morphological differentiation. In November 2016 Valentina obtained her PhD from the University of Padua (Italy), working on the characterization of genetic and epigenetic contributions to phenotypic plasticity in a wild yeast strain. Her PhD project was funded by Fondazione Edmund Mach (Computational Biology Department) in Trento (Italy). During her studies, she had the possibility to combine laboratory techniques with bioinformatic analyses working on both NGS datasets (ChIP-seq, WGS, RNA-seq) and proteomic data. The discovery of protein conformational switches as possible adaptive mechanism in yeast stimulated in her a growing interest in protein aggregation, by virtue of which she joined Paola Picotti's lab in September 2016. In Picotti's group Valentina will apply an approach combining limited proteolysis with MS (LiP-MS) to identify and quantify protein aggregates in complex biological backgrounds. Her work aims to shed light on the physiological role of protein aggregation in different organisms.