Giulia Russo

Tell us about yourself: what is your educational and academic background?
By training I’m a pharmacist and I chose this field of study because I’m pretty interested in medicine and healthcare.
After the graduation I chose to focus on research and I got my PhD in Basic and Applied Biomedical Sciences, focusing on modeling & simulation techniques as support methodologies to optimize the research and development pipeline for medicinal products, especially vaccines.

Can you briefly introduce your research?
In silico medicine (also known as "computational medicine") is the application of modeling & simulation research to problems involving health and medicine. It is the direct use of computational science in the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of a disease.

What are the most challenging features of your work?
In silico medicine can accelerate the conventional pipeline for the development and regulatory assessment of medicines and medical devices, by lowering specific barriers related to their development, validation, accreditation, and optimization.
This will reflect also in the reduction of time-to-market and costs involved for the development and certification of medicines and medical device, which can be leveraged in the negotiation for lower selling prices.
Other challenges deal with the never ending need to obtain a personalized and optimized therapy that could target and cure specific groups of individuals, considering their personal characteristics such as age, gender or phenotype.

What are the most 'intriguous' and fulfilling aspects of your research?
In silico medicine can make ad-personam therapies available for everyone, despite differences in income, social status, living country, race, and cultural origins.

THAT'S ME in few words! What are your outside hobbies?
My main element is the water and I love swimming! Then, I cannot live without traveling and looking for new places to visit!