Alessandra Rufini is a senior investigator at the Laboratory
of Signal Transduction, Department of Biomedicine and Prevention, Rare Disease
Unit at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”. She is also a Contract Professor
of Immunology and Immunopathology in Medicine and Surgery Degree and of General
Pathology in Dentistry and Dental Prosthetics Degree, at the Saint Camillus
International University of Health and Medical Sciences. Alessandra Rufini
completed her Master’s degree in Biology at the University of Rome, “Tor
Vergata”, and her Ph.D. studies in Immunology at the University of Rome “La
Sapienza”. She then received a post-doctoral fellowship from the Italian
Association for Cancer Research (AIRC) and continued her studies at the
University of Rome “Tor Vergata”. Her research focuses on the identification of new
molecular targets and therapeutic strategies for Friedreich ataxia, a rare
disease that has no cure, following both drug discovery and drug repurposing
strategies. In 2017, she got awarded a Winner of the 2016–2017 BeHEARD
Technology Prize from Rare Genomics for the development of a RNF126 RNAi mouse
model by Charles River.
