Serena Di Vincenzo

She obtained both Bachelor's degree in Biological Sciences and Master's degree in Health Biology at the University of Palermo. She started working in the field of research on chronic respiratory diseases already for her degree theses. She focused on the same research topic also during her PhD in Applied Experimental Medical Sciences and Biotechnologies with a focus on Experimental and Clinical Pulmonology, a title obtained in 2016. She expanded her skills abroad, during her PhD thanks to a fellowship from the University of Palermo she began working with primary bronchial epithelial cells at the Department of Pathology and Medical Biology and Pulmonology, University Medical Centre of Groningen (UMCG) in the Netherlands and then, in 2018, she won a European Respiratory Society (ERS) Short-Term Research Fellowship that led her to work at the Pulmonology Department of the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands. Post-doc researcher at the CNR since 2016, she has followed and conducted several research projects with the aim of studying the mechanisms of damage to the airway epithelium triggered by cigarette smoke in chronic respiratory diseases, looking in particular at the inflammatory and oxidative stress mechanisms and the activation of the innate and adaptive immune system.