She received a Laurea in Industrial Biotechnology from the University of Bologna in Italy in 2000 and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005. She completed her postdoctoral work at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla California and joined the faculty at Rice University in 2007 where she holds joint appointments in the departments of Bioengineering and Biosciences. She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award. Her research group is highly interdisciplinary and combines principles and tools from engineering and science to decipher and manipulate cellular quality control mechanisms that underlie the development of human diseases. Current research interests include the design of synthetic biology tools and nanotechnology-based approaches to engineer protein degradation pathways in the complex environment of mammalian cells.