Dr. Michael Alexanian serves as an Assistant Investigator at the Gladstone Institutes and holds the position of Assistant Professor within the UCSF Department of Pediatrics. His academic journey spans multiple continents. Alexanian received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Florence in Italy. After he graduated, Alexanian moved to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia. There, the exposure to the field of epigenetics shaped his subsequent academic pursuits, inspiring him to delve deeper into the intricate mechanisms governing gene regulation within our cells. Alexanian returned to Europe for a PhD degree in stem cell biology at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He then moved to U.S. for his postdoctoral training at the Gladstone Institutes where his research pinpointed novel genes dictating fibrotic processes in heart failure. Establishing his laboratory in 2022 within the Gladstone Institutes, Dr. Alexanian spearheads a research group dedicated to unraveling the genetic and epigenetic mechanisms influencing how cardiac cells change form and function in heart failure, promoting disease progression. The Alexanian Lab is interested in dissecting the gene-level changes that underlie this effect, in order to design targeted therapies to preserve or restore heart function.

Lorenzo Rosa is a Principal Investigator at Carnegie Institution for Science. Lorenzo is also an Assistant Professor (by courtesy) at Stanford University. Prior to joining Carnegie, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of Energy and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich. He holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Science from University of California Berkeley, and a B.S. and M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Italy. His research aims to assess the potential benefits and unintended climate and environmental consequences of innovations engineered to satisfy the increasing global demands for energy, water, and food. Dr. Rosa was awarded the 2019 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Horton Hydrology Research grant and the 2021 AGU Science for Solutions Award. He was also listed among the most influential young leaders in Science and Technology of 2020 by Forbes 30 Under 30. Dr. Rosa is an avid sportsman, when he is not at his desk, you can find him running, cycling, swimming, and skiing. Website: lorenzorosa.com

Domenico Imparato is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Global Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and the University of Hamburg, Germany. Originally from Italy, he received his Ph.D. in Law from the Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna. He was then a DAAD Postdoctoral Sponsored Researcher at the University of Oxford, Saïd Business School, UK. Domenico’s academic work lies at the crossroads of international finance, corporate governance, and tax policy within the ever-evolving landscape of capital markets. His research encompasses diverse areas such as alternative asset management and private equity, family businesses, public corporations, venture capital, tech and growth companies.

Sendy Caffarra is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, School of Medicine (Division of Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics). She is also an Assistant Professor at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy) and a Research Associate at the Basque Center on Brain, Cognition and Language (Spain). She is interested in how our brain changes as a function of language experience. She uses structural and functional measures to monitor brain changes in reading acquisition and second language learning.

Antonella Palmese is a NASA Einstein Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Originally from Italy, she got her undergraduate degree and Masters from La Sapienza University of Rome. She then moved to London for her PhD at University College London to work  on the Dark Energy Survey (DES). Before moving to Berkeley, Antonella was a postdoc at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and at The University of Chicago. Her main research focus is to find the sources of gravitational waves, ripples of space-time that can be detected from events such as collisions between neutron stars or black holes. She uses optical telescopes to identify and study the light that is produced by such events, and then uses both the gravitational wave and optical data to study the expansion of the Universe. She is also very enthusiastic about applying machine learning techniques to astronomy, and she is deeply involved in several lareg galaxy surveys, such as DES and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). Antonella will soon join Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor. 

Donatella D’Aguanno was born in Italy. She studied in Italy and Spain. She taught Italian in Spain, Spanish in England, and Italian at the Dante Alighieri Society in Quito, Ecuador. In 2013 she moved to the US, earning an MA in English at Youngtown State University. After that, she earned an MA in Italian at the University of Pittsburgh. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate in Italian at Stanford University under the supervision of Professor Robert Harrison and Professor Sarah Prodan. Her dissertation focuses on the figure of Saint Francis in the Divine Comedy and his legacy in the contemporary world. At Stanford, she is also the Center of Medieval and Early Modern Studies event coordinator.

Dr. Roberta Sala is currently an Instructor in the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department at Stanford University and is affiliated with the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. She graduated with her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Molecular Biology from the University of Padua, Italy. She then moved to London first thanks to the Erasmus program and then to obtain her Ph.D. in Clinical Oncology at Imperial College London, where she studied the effects of cancer treatment on cancer detection using PET imaging. For her first postdoc, Dr. Sala joined the Biology Department at Stanford where she was working on the effects of centrosome over-duplication in cancer. She then moved to the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department in 2018 where she is working on the generation of human gametes from human pluripotent stem cells.

Department of Chemical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering and SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis. Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

Matteo Cargnello received his Ph.D. in Nanotechnology in 2012 at the University of Trieste, Italy. He was then a post-doctoral scholar in the Chemistry Department at the University of Pennsylvania, before joining the Faculty at Stanford University in January 2015. He is currently Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and, by courtesy, of Materials Science and Engineering, and Terman Faculty Fellow. General goals of the research in the Cargnello group pertain to solving energy and environmental challenges. Key areas of interest are in the reduction of emission of greenhouse gases, capture and conversion of CO2, carbon-free hydrogen production, and the sustainable synthesis of fuels and chemicals through thermal, photo- and electrocatalytic processes. Website: cargnellogroup.stanford.edu

Camilla Hawthorne is Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. She is a principal faculty member in the UCSC Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program, and a faculty affiliate of the UCSC Science & Justice Research Center and Legal Studies Program. Camilla serves as Chair of the Black Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers, and is a project manager and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She is co-editor of the 2021 volume The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship. Her forthcoming 2022 monograph with Cornell University Press, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean, explores the ways that citizenship has emerged as a key terrain of struggle over racial nationalism in Italy, and—bringing together insights from critical migration/citizenship studies and Black studies—argues that citizenship is crucial for understanding how racism and race are being reconfigured in the twenty-first century. In 2020, she was named as one of the national Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera‘s 110 Women of the Year for her work on the Black diaspora in Italy.

Leonardo Award 2020 for Physic, Mathematics and Engineering

Leonardo Award 2020 for Humanities

Leonardo Award 2020 for Life and Sciences

Leonardo 500 Honorary Award

Leonardo 500 Honorary Award

Gaia Andreoletti
Leonardo 500 Award in Biological Sciences

Simone D’Amico
Leonardo 500 Award in Engineering

Vanessa Polito
Leonardo 500 Award in Mathematic & Physics