Dr Beatrice Costa

Beatrice Costa is a Volunteer Writer at BioNews, having originally joined the publication under the auspices of its writing scheme. She studied Biology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and completed her undergraduate thesis at University College London's Queen Square Institute of Neurology, where she conducted laboratory research on the genetic and clinical spectrum of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). She then pursued a PhD in Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics, investigating the molecular drivers of FTLD by integrating gene co-expression and protein-protein interaction networks to prioritize candidate genes for in vitro testing. Following her PhD, she specialised in multi-omics data analysis during her postdoctoral research at the Gladstone Institutes, University of California San Francisco, where she explored the transcriptional signatures of Lewy body disease and Parkinson's disease using single-cell transcriptomics and CRISPR approaches. She is now based at Human Technopole in Milan, Italy, contributing to a large European collaboration that investigates the genetic drivers of NeuroCOVID through genome analysis in brain organoid models.