Marilisa Cortesi wins the competition with her work titled “An in-silico study of cancer cell survival and spatial distribution within a 3D microenvironment”. A special Jury Recognition was also assigned to Laura Baumgartner (UPF).
As usual in occasion of the annual VPH Barcelona Summer School, the VPH Institute has made available an award for the Best Poster presentation. The competition was won by the VPHi member Marilisa Cortesi from the University of Bologna, with her work on cancer cell.
Marilisa has studied biomedical engineering at the University of Bologna (Italy) where she graduated with a thesis in Synthetic Biology developed at the University of Washington (Seattle, USA) under the supervision of Eric Klavins, PhD and Stefano Severi, PhD. Afterwards, with the guidance of Emanuele Giordano MD, PhD and Simone Furini PhD, she earned a PhD degree in Bioengineering at the University of Bologna developing a project on computational modeling of phenotypic transitions in human cancer cells.
Currently Marilisa’s work focuses on the development of novel technologies for the in-vitro study of cancer cells cultured in 3D scaffolds. She mainly specialises in computational modeling and the in silico prediction of cell behavior in complex environments, but she is also contributing to the development of innovative technologies for the non-destructive quantification of variables of interest (e.g. vitality) in scaffold-based 3D cell cultures.
Her poster at the VPH Barcelona Summer Schools described a general purpose in silico simulator that can be programmed to replicate and predict the behavior of a population of cells cultured in a 3D environment. This work stems out of an ongoing scientific partnership with the IRCCS-IRST at Meldola, Italy.
“I’m a very proud to have received this award. I admire the mission of the VPH institute and thus receiving this recognition for my work is an honor and a great motivation for the future.” says Marilisa.
As this year the quality of the works presented was very high, the Jury decided to assign also an official Special Jury Recognition to another poster that reached very high scores. This special recognition was given to Laura Baumgartner from UPF for her poster on “New method to simulate the behaviour of intervertebral disc cells in a multifactorial environment”. Laura already won the Best VPHi poster award last year, and demonstrated to have maintained very high standards.
The VPHi could not be prouder of having such talented young researchers in the community. We wish them our best luck for their future careers! Once again, congratulations!
