Team

Thomas Vaccari – Thomas joined the Unimi faculty in 2017 as an Associate Professor, after 7 years as a junior group leader at IFOM. Since June 2025, he is a Full Professor of Cellular and Experimental Biology. After graduating in Milan, he completed his doctoral work with Anne Ephrussi at the EMBL in Germany (2003) and later worked as a Postdoc at UC Berkeley in the lab of David Bilder (2004-2009). Research in Thomas’ lab is, or has been, supported by the Italian ministry of research (MUR), Telethon Italia, the European community, AIRC (Associazione Italiana Ricerca sul Cancro), WCR (Worldwide Cancer Research), the University of Milan and Fondazione Cariplo. Thomas is part of the board of the European Drosophila Society (EDS) and of the EMBL alumni association, and is a founding member of the JEDI (Junior European Drosophila Investigators) network. He serves as an editor for the journals Autophagy, Scientific reports, Cells and Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology. See his track record of publications on Google Scholar – PubMed and his ORCID profile

Paulien E. Smeele – Pauli investigates the genetics of a familiar form of ALS. In particular, she is interested in elucidating how lysosomal damage, autophagy and secretion shape the fate of neurons in Drosophila models of the disease. Her project is supported by the EU MSCA Sand project. See her publications in Pubmed

Simona Totaro – Simona has eploited fly models of brain tumors to study the role of cohesin in tumorigenesis, in collaboration with the group of Valentina Massa (unimi). See her publication in in Biorxiv

Roberta Schirru – Roberta trained for her master at the University of Cagliari in the group of Fabian Fegiun. She is now studying the role of autophagy in a Drosophila model of Lysosomal Storage Disease.

Gaia Consonni – Gaia performed her master thesis in the lab under the supervision of Antonio Galeone and now for her PhD she is investigating the functionality of the Drosophila gut in fly models of rare disease in collaboration with the group of Elisa Borghi (unimi). See her publications in Pubmed

Giulia Vitale – Giulia attended the lab for her master thesis and now for as a PhD candidate she is investigating the functionality of the Drosophila gut in fly models of intestinal pseudo-obstruction.

Giorgia Spina – Fabiola is a student of the Biomedical Biology M.Sc. program of the University of Milan. She is investigating models of ALS in fruit flies.

Michal Mazur – Michal is and Erasmus+ student recently graduated from the Jagiellonian University of Kraków. He is investigating models of visceral myopathy in fruit flies.

Antonio Galeone – Antonio obtained his PhD at IIT and was a Postdoc at Baylor College of Medicine with Hamed Jafar-Nejad and subsequently in our lab as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral fellow. He is now a researcher at CNR-Nanotech in Lecce. We are still collaborating with a number of shared projects in the field of glycosylation, so he frequently visits our lab. He’s the proud new father of vaccarilabbaby#2! See his publications on PubMed and Biorxiv

Erika Donà – Erika earned her PhD at EMBL, Heidelberg in the group of Darren Gilmour and has recently finished her Postdoc with Greg Jefferies at LMB, Cambridge. She is now a researcher at CNR-Insititute of Neuroscience in Milan. We are collaborating on the elucidation of biological significance of single cell transcriptomics data from developing fly neurons. See her publications on Pubmed and Biorxiv