Dr Melania D'Angiolo

Dr Melania D'Angiolo is a Volunteer Writer at BioNews, having originally joined the publication under the auspices of its writing scheme. Melania is currently working in the laboratory of Professor Jurg Bahler at the Institute of Healthy Ageing at University College London, where I am characterising the role of conserved unknown genes during the ageing process using a combination of experimental and computational approaches. Previously, Melania studied molecular and cellular biology at the University of Pisa, Italy, where she obtained a master's degree. During her studies, she obtained funding twice from the Erasmus+ programme and moved first to the Department of Genetics at the University of Valencia, Spain, where she analysed the genome of RNA viruses infecting the crop pest Spodoptera exigua, and then to the Institute for Research on Cancer and Ageing (IRCAN) in Nice, France, where she studied molecular mechanisms of genome evolution in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. After that, she remained at IRCAN for several years to carry out her PhD and postdoc, investigating the impact of telomere length and sequence variation on organismal fitness.