Politecnico di Milano: Researcher Cristina Chirizzi Wins The Brainy 2021 Call

Cristina Chirizzi, a postdoc researcher at the Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering “Giulio Natta” at the Politecnico di Milano, has won a scholarship worth €30,000 awarded by Brainy, an association that supports research into brain diseases and neuroscience and which last November published a call for young researchers to finance research projects focused on investigating the reasons leading to the onset of brain tumours in order to be able to fight and treat them in the best possible way.

The project presented by Dr Chirizzi, in collaboration with the Carlo Besta Neurological Institute, is focused on developing technical advances for the visualisation of tumour margins during neurosurgery for the removal of one of the most aggressive forms of malignant brain tumour, glioblastoma. An alternative to the fluorescent biomarkers currently used in the intraoperative setting was therefore proposed, with the aim of increasing their specificity for tumour tissues.

The winner is presented with her award by the association on 21 February at the Politecnico.

Dr Chirizzi studied Molecular Biotechnology in Turin, where she obtained her Laurea Magistrale (equivalent to Master of Science) in 2013. She took her Ph.D. at the San Raffaele Hospital, where she studied and analysed the development of methods based on magnetic resonance for the visualization of immune cell activity during neuroinflammation processes. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Politecnico di Milano, where she has focused her research on the development of biomaterials and nanosystems for biological applications.