Chiara is interested in quantitative aspects of intracellular processes and cellular heterogeneity. Since 2020 she has been a postdoc researcher in MuSE’s team, where she is working on the characterization of mutagenesis in real-time at the single cell level in Escherichia coli. She combines experimental and theoretical approaches, spanning microbiology, microfluidics and microscopy, as well as image processing and data analysis.
Previously, Chiara studied physics at the University of Torino (Italy), and completed her master thesis in experimental solid state physics. She then moved her research to quantitative biology and obtained a PhD in physics from Politecnico di Torino in 2019, on the role of single cell heterogeneity in post-transcriptional gene regulation as well as in the growth of populations of cancer cells. She has developed experimental protocols, image and data analysis tools, which she also adapted to study other biological processes in mammalian cells: i) metabolic optimization of therapeutic protein production in cells, ii) vesicle-mediated intracellular trafficking and iii) non-invasive high-throughput screening of cell growth.
chiara-enrico-bena