After graduating in Biophysics at the University of Tor Vergata in 1993, she continued her studies through a specialization in Plant Biology at the C.R.I.B.I. (Interdepartmental Research Center for Innovative Sciences), at the University of Padua. She then began her research activities for her doctorate at the EMBL laboratories. In 1998 she obtained a PhD in Structural Biology at Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat in Heidelberg, Germany. During her studies she spent several periods of training abroad: in 1996 she performed a stage of 6 months in the Department of Virology of the Medical University of Vienna, in 1998 she did part of her PostDoctoral Fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Children's Hospital, Howard Medical School in Boston, MA, USA. In 1999 she was PostDoctoral fellow in the Department of Structural Virology at the C.N.R.S. of Gif-sur-Yvette, France. At the same time (from 2000 to 2003) she collaborated with the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Ecole Normale Superiore in Paris, France. Her training then continued in Italy in 2004 at the GSK Vaccines Research Center (formerly Novartis, in Siena, Italy) firstly as a researcher, then as a Senior Research Investigator and finally in 2009 as Head of Structural Vaccinology.